YouTuber Asmongold expressed frustration with a persistent shader issue in Black Myth: Wukong. Fellow YouTubers GamersNexus have offered to diagnose the issue with an ion beam.
Though it sounds like something a James Bond villain might use, the use of an ion beam on a CPU actually has a solid scientific reason behind it – identifying hardware failure.
GamersNexus made an offer to Asmongold on Twitter/X, saying that they had seen the shader issues in Black Myth: Wukong that Asmongold was experiencing and that it appeared to be related to chip degradation of his Intel Core i9 13900K PC.
To diagnose the problem, GamersNexus would subject the suspect CPU to a range of tests. This includes non-destructive tests before moving on to more aggressive tests such as cross-sectioning and ion beam analysis. The nature of these later tests will mean the CPU will be sliced into several pieces.
Asmongold replied that he intended to purchase a new CPU, so the old one could be sent to GamersNexus for a full analysis.
I'll probably get a new one soon and when I do I'll send it to youExtra info:Swapping to windows 8 solved the problem 100%This similar problem happened with The First Descendant and after about 30 crashes on shader compiling, it worked perfectly afterwards for 100+ hrs
— Zack (@Asmongold) August 21, 2024
The Twitter post indicated that GamersNexus believes the fault to be related to the ongoing Intel 13th and 14th-generation stability problems. According to Intel these problems are related to faulty microcode and have caused a range of issues for users including poor gaming performance and crashes.
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During the benchmarking tests for Black Myth: Wukong we encountered problems when using our test bench PC, which has an Intel core i5-13600K CPU. The game crashed on at least two occasions when using this PC, but was stable on other devices, including the Steam Deck.
Intel has released the beta version of its microcode update, which the company believes should resolve the stability problems.
Many analysts and users believe that some CPUs are already too badly degraded for the fix to help. Something which the GamersNexus tests may be able to prove.
But, who knew that a potential answer to the degradation of Intel CPUs could be coming from a team-up as unlikely as Asmongold and GamersNexus.