Following reports that the Epic Games Store launcher was gobbling up CPU resources and, as a result, raising system temperatures on some PCs, Epic has issued a patch. However, it is "not a full solution," so you might still see elevated CPU usage and temps when the launcher is idle.
The issue gained traction in a Reddit post by user Neoncarbon, who claimed that disabling the launcher had a dramatic affect on his AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU temps—the user claimed it dropped from 50C to 37C. Others in the thread made similar claims.
"Looked at mine, 5900X - 64C while just browsing YouTube...closed Epic Games launcher, drops 20 degrees," another user wrote.
The folks at HotHardware were able to "verify this abnormal activity" on one of their AMD Ryzen testbeds running a liquid-cooled Ryzen 9 5950X CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. In one of the images they posted with the launcher not running, the Windows Task Manager shows CPU usage at 1 percent, while the Ryzen Master utility indicates the CPU temp is at 34.28C.
In a second image taken with the launcher running in the background, CPU usage is shown at 7 percent, and the CPU temp jumps to 56.78C.
Best CPU for gaming: the top chips from Intel and AMD
Best graphics card: your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: get into the game ahead of the rest
"Taking a look at the task manager, we noted that the Epic Games launcher is lighting up cores and keeping some of them lit even while seemingly doing nothing, and not even updating a game in the background," the site noted.
They also claim that the launcher was "firing off data at regular intervals to over 22 different servers," regardless of whether the launcher was in the foreground, background, or minimized.
The same behavior was not observed when running other game store apps, such as Steam and GOG (save for the when the apps first load). So, what's going on? According to Epic's Sergiy Galyonkin, it is due to a "bug" in the launcher.
The hotfix is live now (11.0.2). It's not a full solution, but things should improve.December 29, 2020
According to Sergiy, the 11.0.2 hotfix that is now available is not a complete fix for the issue, "but things should improve." To apply it, just head into the Settings section and it will be listed at the top. Alternatively, you can download the latest build from Epic and reinstall the launcher.
