Intel chip bugginess
2024-02-23 18:24:45.902577+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
RAD Game Tools: Intel Processor Instability Causing Oodle Decompression Failures
RAD has become aware of a problem that can cause Oodle Data decompression failures, or crashes in games built with Unreal. We believe that this is a hardware problem which affects primarily Intel 13900K and 14900K processors, less likely 13700, 14700 and other related processors as well. Only a small fraction of those processors will exhibit this behavior. The problem seems to be caused by a combination of BIOS settings and the high clock rates and power usage of these processors, leading to system instability and unpredictable behavior under heavy load.
As far as we can tell, there is not any software bug in Oodle or Unreal that is causing this. Due to what seem to be overly optimistic BIOS settings, some small percentage of processors go out of their functional range of clock rate and power draw under high load, and execute instructions incorrectly. This is being seen disproportionately in Oodle Data decompression because unlike most gameplay, simulation, audio or rendering code, decompression needs to perform extra integrity checks to handle accidentally or maliciously corrupted data, and is thus likely to spot inconsistencies very soon after they occur. These decode failures then typically result in an error message.
This M2 MacBook Pro goes wacky occasionally. Some of that might be MacOS Sonoma, which has some real doozies fo display bugs in everyday usage, but I kinda wonder if there's non-deterministic behavior in pushing other bits of the hardware too hard.