The Epic Games Launcher has been criticized over the past few days for using a nonsensical amount of CPU resources and raising idle temperatures to a glaring degree, but luckily, the controversy got bad enough to convince its parent company to take a serious look at what is purportedly a simple bug. Following a few days of investigation, director of publishing strategy Sergiy Galyonkin has confirmed that Epic has identified the problem and is pushing out a hotfix to users that should alleviate the issue to some extent.
“The hotfix is live now (11.0.2),” Galyonkin confirmed in a tweet sent out this afternoon. “It’s not a full solution, but things should improve.”
Unfortunately, Galyonkin was being honest when he said that the hotfix wouldn’t solve the problem completely. We updated to the latest version of the Epic Games Launcher but noticed that it still exhibits relatively high CPU utilization in comparison to competing apps such as Steam and GOG. While Steam uses no more than .5 percent when idle, Task Manager is reporting up to 3 percent of usage for the Epic Games Launcher, even when it’s in a minimized state.
We’ll have to wait for the next patch to see if there’s any improvement, but what’s interesting is that the Epic Games Launcher has reportedly been using an inordinately high amount of CPU resources for years. Supporting this theory is a thread on the official Unreal Engine forums (via r/AMD), which warned users of high processor usage all the way back in October 2015. It isn’t clear whether the issue referenced in that thread is directly related to the recent controversy, but critics seem to believe that the root issue might involve something nefarious (e.g., data collection).
We have identified the issue and currently testing the fix. You’ll see it in the patch notes once the launcher gets updated 🙂
— Sergiy Galyonkin (@galyonkin) December 29, 2020
The hotfix is live now (11.0.2). It's not a full solution, but things should improve.
— Sergiy Galyonkin (@galyonkin) December 29, 2020