Raptor Lake instability hits streamer Asmongold — Black Myth: Wukong shader compilation fails on stream

Raptor Lake instability issues have hit Twitch streamer Asmongold: A clip from Asmongold's Twitch stream (shared by OTKnetwork on X) shows Asmongold running the shader compilation process in Black Myth: Wukong, only for the process to spit out the infamous Unreal Engine 5 "out of memory" error.

In the clip, Asmongold is waiting to see if the game's shader compilation process will fail or not. At 24.59% the game shows the aforementioned "out of memory" error. Afterward, Asmongold restarts the game and runs the compilation process again to see if it will pass. According to OTKnetwork, "Asmongold and his chat are doing predictions together on what % Wukong game shaders will get to before it crashes". Each time Asmongold restarts the shader compilation process, the process crashes at a higher percentage.

The devs behind Black Myth: Wukong know about this issue and have already put out a tutorial on the game's Steam forum on how to fix the problem. The error is primarily caused by the instability issues plaguing Intel 13th and 14th Gen processors.

The comments section in OTKnetwork's X post reveals that Asmongold's system has a Core i9-14900K Raptor Lake Refresh CPU. Black Myth: Wukong uses Unreal Engine 5, which is known to be sensitive to Raptor Lake instability during the shader compilation process.

Intel has already patched Raptor Lake's instability issues through a new microcode update, which not only rectifies CPU instability but also addresses CPU degradation issues caused by excessively high voltages.

Sadly, however, Intel's microcode update is unable to fix Raptor Lake CPUs that have already degraded. These chips will still see instability issues even with the new microcode installed. It's possible that Asmongold's i9-14900K has already degraded to the point where it is no longer stable in stock form, or perhaps he hasn't installed the latest BIOS update with the patched microcode.