The game launcher makes it impossible to play.
It’s absurd, but it’s true. The main character of the story is’Epic Games Launcher’. Epic Games Launcher is a program that launches the’Epic Games Store’. Its main function is to purchase and play games. Recently, it has gained a lot of popularity with free games.
However, a problem was raised that the CPU temperature would rise when using the Epic Games launcher. The performance degradation caused by this is a bonus. At first, I thought it was a rumor or a story that only applies to some users. Curiosity started an experiment. It wasn’t enough to swear. There must be game launchers that really interfere with the game.
It doesn’t seem to cause performance degradation just by looking at the functions it provides…
#’The CPU is burning because of Epic Games’
The issue was first raised on the Reddit AMD channel on December 25th. One user claimed that when the Epic Games launcher was disabled, the AMD CPU Ryzen 5800X standby temperature dropped from 50℃ to 37℃. Other users also complained in comments that there was a similar phenomenon. The post drew a lot of attention, and as of December 30, more than 11,000 recommendations and 1,400 comments were posted.
According to the comment, the symptom is not a problem only with the AMD Ryzen 5000 series. Fever symptoms also occur in pre-AMD CPU series. Another problem was the abnormal CPU usage.
Some users have argued that there are symptoms even with Intel CPUs, although not significant. Laptop users are having the most trouble. They said the Epic Games launcher doubled the battery consumption.
# Not rumors, but real
The reporter is lucky (?) using an AMD CPU. I went to the test right away.
The CPU in use is Ryzen 5600X, the cooler is Corsair H115i PRO RGB, and the applied thermal paste is YP-S6. Measurement was conducted using’NZXT’. At the time of the experiment The indoor temperature was around 13℃.
As a result of the experiment, the fever symptoms are clearly felt. Standby CPU temperature averaged 35~37℃. When I ran the Epic Games launcher, the CPU temperature recorded 44℃~47℃. It’s not as’surprising’ fever as the Reddit post, but it’s ridiculous for a game launcher. However, the reporter’s PC is more advantageous in managing heat by using an air-cooled cooler and a big tower case. It is estimated that the heat phenomenon will be more serious in the air-cooled cooler and middle tower environment used by most PC users.
The CPU usage of the Epic Games launcher is not too small. There is no big problem as far as CPU usage is displayed in the task manager. However, as can be seen from the picture attached to the text, the workload of some CPU cores is excessive. Even if only the Epic Games launcher was turned on, CPU 1 and 2 core usage was recorded at 30-40%. Normally, CPU usage is around 10%. Even though the web browser, Steam, and KakaoTalk are turned on.
CPU usage did not decrease over time. Abnormal CPU utilization caused heat. The reason why laptop battery consumption has doubled is also explained.
CPU status after running the Epic Games launcher.
The usage of cores 1 and 2 increased dramatically.
# When playing, turn off the Epic Games launcher.
These issues also affect game performance. As a result of benchmarking with 4 games, a’significant’ performance decline occurred due to the Epic Games launcher.
The approximate performance of the PC used in the benchmark is as follows. CPU is AMD Ryzen 5600X, graphics card is RTX 3070, RAM is 24GB. Test <히트맨 2>, <워해머: 버민타이드 2>, <콜 오브 듀티: 블랙 옵스 콜드 워>In a 1080p environment, the graphics options went best. only, <사이버펑크 2077>Is an optimization problem and adjusted the graphics appropriately.
The average frames for the same section of the four games were recorded. For comparison, ① when the steam (+ game launcher) is on, and ② when the Epic Games launcher is on.
The game with the largest frame change <콜 오브 듀티: 블랙 옵스 콜드 워>It is about 12% difference. When only’Battle Net’ and Steam were on, it averaged 70 FPS. On the other hand, when the Epic Games launcher was turned on, it averaged 61 FPS.
<히트맨 2>Wow <워해머: 버민타이드 2>Also, the performance decline was seen. In a Steam-only environment, the two games recorded 78.18 FPS and 153 FPS, respectively. When Epic Games was turned on, it went down to 69.64 FPS and 147 FPS. The difference in performance is approximately -11% and -4%.
Exceptionally <사이버펑크 2077>Is unchanged. Both environments are within the error range of around 70 FPS on average. However, the environment in which Epic Games was turned on was 2~3 FPS lower.
As a result, the performance difference is recorded differently depending on the game, but the obvious cause of the performance decline is’Epic Games launcher. Game launchers interfere with pleasant gameplay.
<사이버펑크 2077>Tested only the prolog section. The gap is expected to widen in the combat environment.
# Too much data transmission
The aforementioned problems do not occur in other game launchers. Steam, Battle.net, and Origin record high CPU usage only during initial execution. After that, in the standby state, it shows low CPU usage and takes up only 200-300mb of memory. This is why heat or performance degradation does not occur in other game launchers.
The Epic Games launcher has problems even in standby. It means that it takes up excessive performance even in the standby state, or that work is continuing.
Overseas data transmission is cited as the reason. Overseas IT media’Hot Hardware’ reported that the Epic Games launcher transmits too much data even when in standby, which is 14 times more data than Steam and’Nvidia GeForce Experience’.
Tests conducted by the media were tested to determine the authenticity.
The transmission data of the Epic Games launcher was 187% more than that of Steam. Not up to 14 times, but about 3 times more. The Epic Games launcher received about 1.6mb in an hour and sent 413.3kb. Steam recorded 1.3mb for reception and 143.9kb for transmission.
There is a lot of data to be transmitted. Of these, about 6% of all transmitted data is estimated for’tracking’ purposes. Tracking is the act of collecting user information, and is mainly used for customized advertisements and customer information. The URL to which the data is sent is as follows. Looking at the URL, it seems to be used for tracking.
tracking-website-prod07-epic-961842049.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com:443
GlassWire was used for data measurement.
#’Performance degradation is just a bug’
When the issue of performance degradation became controversial, Epic Games began solving the case.
Epic Games admitted to the poor performance. Epic Games developer Sergey Galyonkin responded in a Twitter conversation with a user on December 27, saying, “This is a bug and the team is working on a fix.” On December 29th, they released an emergency revision, but added that the problem was not completely resolved.
The reviews of users who have updated the’Hot Fix’ version are divided. Some say that the waiting state problem has been resolved, while others say the problem is still there.
Apart from that, Epic Games doesn’t say anything about the fact that there is too much data to be transmitted outside.