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. When starting an Unreal Engine-based game, the most common failure is of this type: DecompressShader(): Could not decompress shader (GetShaderCompressionFormat=Oodle) However, this problem does not only affect Oodle, and machines that suffer from this instability will also exhibit failures in standard benchmark and stress test programs. Any programs which heavily use the processor on many threads may cause crashes or unpredictable behavior. There have been crashes seen in RealBench, CineBench, Prime95, Handbrake, Visual Studio, and more. This problem can also show up as a GPU error message, such as spurious "out of video memory" errors, even though it is caused by the CPU.
We do not have acccess to diagnostic processor information that would nail down the exact cause and best workaround for this problem. It seems that many motherboard/BIOS manufacturers are shipping with settings that push the processor outside its safe operating range. Because this problem appears to affect only a small fraction of processors, some users have had success with returning their processor to the manufacturer and getting a new one which doesn't exhibit the problem. Other workarounds require using tuning utilities or modifying BIOS settings. Note that doing so incorrectly can cause damage to your system. The changes we are recommending here are, to the best of our knowledge, completely safe, but you are solely responsible for any damages or loss caused by changing these settings from their factory defaults. If you are uncomfortable or worried about using tuning utilities (even officially sanctioned ones) or changing your BIOS settings, and frequent crashes also occur in the benchmark programs mentioned previously, you should be able to return the CPU or the entire computer to the manufacturer instead.
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