Facepalm: Users of Intel’s high-end 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs have been complaining about instability issues in gaming for months. Now, Chipzilla will have to address negative feedback from GeForce GPU owners as well.

Nvidia’s latest graphics drivers for GeForce GPUs include some interesting release notes, which the company is sharing on its official forums as well. The GeForce Game Ready Drivers version 552.12 provide a notable “please note” section at the end, addressing two specific issues related to Chromium-based applications (such as web browsers and Discord) and the challenges gamers have faced with Intel’s Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs.

If a system built around an Intel 13th/14th Gen unlocked desktop CPU is experiencing stability issues, out-of-video-memory error messages, or crashes during shader compilation, the release notes advise users to seek troubleshooting assistance on Intel and Epic Games websites. The first site referenced by Nvidia links to Intel processor support forums, where an employee acknowledges the company’s awareness of instability issues with “certain workloads.”

Intel has stated it is actively collaborating with its partners and analyzing these issues to provide an effective solution, as noted in a statement made in February, although users continue to report crashes to this day. The second link provided by Nvidia directs users to the RAD Game Tools website, where Epic Games explains the nature of the issue.

The root cause of instability primarily experienced on Intel 13900K and 14900K processors, according to RAD, is a hardware issue that can lead to “Oodle Data decompression failures” or crashes in games built with the Unreal engine. A small fraction of the mentioned CPUs may exhibit this unpredictable behavior under heavy computing loads, which seems to be triggered by a combination of BIOS settings, high CPU clock rates, and power usage.

RAD’s website offers successful workarounds to mitigate instability or crashes, including limiting the peak performance of Intel CPUs using software tools like Intel XTU and adjusting BIOS/UEFI firmware settings. It’s hoped that Intel will release a definitive fix, likely through a microcode update, for its high-performance gaming processors in the near future.

Aside from the instability issues, Nvidia’s latest GeForce drivers provide specific optimizations for Season 3 of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Diablo IV with its ray tracing upgrade. The driver release also addresses a bug in the Resizable BAR profile for Horizon Forbidden West. However, some issues affecting older GPU hardware (GeForce GTX 10/RTX 20 series), Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, Tekken 8, and VR gaming will unfortunately require future fixes.