Thursday, March 28th 2024
Developers of Outpost Infinity Siege Recommend Underclocking i9-13900K and i9-14900K for Stability on Machines with RTX 4090
Outpost: Infinity Siege developers recommend underclocking Intel's current and previous flagship desktop processors, the Core i9-14900K and i9-13900K, to prevent the game from crashing. This recommendation goes out to those with a GeForce RTX 4090 paired with either a Core i9-13900K or i9-14900K, we're fairly sure that the recommendation even extends to those with i9-14900KS and i9-13900KS. Team Ranger, the developers of the game, just released their second patch in just a week following the game's launch. In the patch notes, they ask users to use Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), to lower the P-core clock speeds down to at least 5.00 GHz (maximum boost). This development closely follows a February 2024 report which says that game stability issues of high-end "Raptor Lake" processors are linked to power limit unlocks.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
85 Comments on Developers of Outpost Infinity Siege Recommend Underclocking i9-13900K and i9-14900K for Stability on Machines with RTX 4090
We already know UE is a crappy engine, so its not impossible that itself has inherit problems in its code, but in regards to Intel advising people to make changes its almost certainly telling them to put things back to spec, so if it is hardware instability it will be down to motherboard's running out of spec.
For reference its entirely possible to have buggy code that only gets exposed on fast enough hardware (timing issues). One reason why console manufacturers make such an effort to gimp newer refreshes of hardware to match timings and such.
There is nothing I can find on the net stating people running this hardware at spec is inherently unstable.
- it's not about other games, but other workloads with similar behaviour observed
- it's not about any i9, but a small number of select CPUs
- and it's not about CPUs running "too fast", but getting into instability territory in several workloads outside of this game too
The article is pretty simple. In order to isolate the issue, more specific investigation would be needed.
Original 2011 Skyrim would break hard above 60 fps, Fallout 4 showed similar issues to a lower extent.
Even then limiting the frame rate should fix it.
Remember what 12900K runs at? The best silicon they could make could only do 5.2 GHz (absolute maximum of selected cores).
How do you think such big improvement with the same process in such a short period of time could have happened?
I can tell you that:
- Some improvements in the process might have helped - but with the same process and the same underlying technology there is only a very limited scope of improvements that can be done.
- They pushed frequencies hard. And then they pushed hard AGAIN. They are on the absolute edge and breaking point of what the chips can handle.
- They must have abandoned reliability safety margins for these chips to make this happen.
So in this situation - can somebody be really surprised that some chips are unstable at these breakneck frequencies?BTW 12900 was 8+8, 14700 is now 8 + 12 and 14900 8 + 16 cores. There is more heat and more power drawn in these new chips - that does not help either.
And one more thing: these chips can do AVX-512. It is disabled because it stressed the chips too much and was breaking them. I guess if we knew the frequencies the chips need to run at to be able to handle AVX-512 - we would learn the true stable frequency for Alder and Raptor lakes.
As you mentioned, I do worry about the longevity of these i9 processors because they are clearly running at frequencies, power and heat, that may cause them to degrade or fail prematurely. The number may sound low only because the number of i9 sold should be very low as compared to more popular models like i5/i7. I am happy with the i7 12700K because it fast enough and I don't need that many E-cores. 16 E-cores is just ridiculous and clearly not aiming at being efficient.
There is no problem with Raptor Lake's boost frequencies. The processors are fully stable and capable of handling it. They will not malfunction as long as their cooling and power requirements are met.
No reliability margins were abandoned. Since Intel doesn't rely on TSMC and their production is fully vertically integrated from sand to packaged silicon, they've just stringently binned each processor for their quality grade. Remember every CPU since the 13900K is exactly the same, they just differ in clocks, with the 13900KS and now 14900KS being the highest quality chips they offer.
AVX-512 isn't a factor and even if it had been enabled it wouldn't run so high executing that kind of vectorized code. Current requirements would be insane.
You don't know if all Intel fabs produce the same quality chips so there is that. Having said that just like AMD the best chips become I9 and the worst chips become I3. They are not bulletproof.
If you enabled AVX-512 on these chips the PSU would definitely trip. Probably need a 1600W behemoth with a 4090.
Here is some examples for reference.
I am part of the FF7 modding community and we have had issues with timing when loading different modules into the game, as well as hext code, (both when system is too slow and also when its too fast), these were difficult to fix with changes to the hooking mechanism.
I currently use Flagrum mod manager with FF15, and on my game the autobuild.earc file doesnt get patched on launch, its almost certainly a timing issue as like the FF7 mod manager patching is done in memory on the fly. I even see occasional issues with workshop mods a official patching mechanism supported by Square Enix.
If somebody pushes chips so hard that there are (almost) no safety margins for reliability left, bad things happen.
In the old days 14900K would have been released with 4800/4000 MHz stock frequencies, a very nice, efficient and very easy to cool product. I am going to test how it runs set this way now.
I mean look at this document which some are claiming proves faulty CPUs are the cause.
www.radgametools.com/oodleintel.htm
We can see in the article errors are being mislabelled, e.g. the devs acknowledge a bad hash of data can cause their engine to report "out of video memory" thats a code problem. They also report they are mislabelling verification errors as a generic "unable to load shader".
The article starts of by stating hardware problems, but then goes on to confirm its bios related, bios is software not hardware.
It also confirms they are not sure of what the problem is other than its generic system instability.
Some solutions reported by their customers include disabling XMP, reducing SVID back to spec, reducing power limits back to spec, and downclocking CPUs. The latter could work because it in effect can force the CPU back into normal operating range by the lower clock speeds, its masking a bad bios configuration.
So yes there is nothing even in this UE document that confirms any kind of faulty CPU.
This story should be putting pressure on board vendors to stop with what they doing and UE developers to improve their code, but its a let off for them if people start blaming the chips instead.
The AMD platform also hasnt been plain sailing, burnt out chips, due to (guess who) motherboard bios's misconfigured (out of spec behaviour). Both vendors push to the limits but in different ways. AMD just do it differently to Intel. This is a reason why board vendors have started to get caught out, they took liberties for a long time with their baseline overclock, over volt etc. and largely got away with it due to the chip vendors leaving more tolerance in the products, those days are gone for the foreseeable future.
The 13th and "14th generation" Core i9 processors are identical with no silicon-level changes between them. After a year manufacturing the same chips in an already mature node, Intel actually managed to mass-produce chips that reach the i9-13900KS's clock targets with their manufacturing level improvements in form of the i9-14900K, and honestly this is remarkable. And even more remarkable is that they managed to stretch this to actually make a batch or two of i9-14900KS chips that somehow go above and beyond, even if you need to trade the extreme increase in power consumption even compared to the already hungry 13900KS for the last 200 MHz.
It doesn't warrant a generational leap (which is why "14th Gen is a scam" is a thing), but it's a welcome improvement in chip quality regardless.
And even more sad is, that these are actually very good products, being LITERALLY DESTROYED by their manufacturer with insane out of the box settings and not having enough control over what motherboard manufacturers do with these chips, everything done only to improve how Intel looks, at the expense of the end customers. Because they will have problems dealing with all those baked, failing and unstable chips.
Tragedy.