Epic Games Store bug results in elevated temperatures on Ryzen CPUs

Lately, Epic Games has been luring gamers to its Games Store again via a holiday giveaway of free games. Unfortunately, it seems there are some issues with the Epic Games Launcher. HotHardware confirmed user reports that the Epic Games Launcher has a bug that causes unexplained CPU utilization on AMD Ryzen-based computers. This can result in CPU temperatures of over 50°C when the system is idling. The issue disappears as soon as the Epic Games launcher is closed.

With over 6.8k upvotes and 864 comments, Neoncarbon’s Reddit post has evolved into people sharing similar experiences after shutting down the Epic Games Launcher. It appears that anyone that has the Epic Games launcher running in the background has higher CPU temps and usage, even while idle on the desktop. However, it seems especially pronounced on Ryzen CPUs such as Neoncarbon’s Ryzen 7 5800X. Again, we were also able to verify this abnormal activity on one of our testbeds, running a liquid-cooled AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. In the first image below, you'll note CPU temps on this well-cooled rig sit around 53C when the Epic Games launcher is running, and with about 2% CPU utilization from the app itself on a 16-core Zen 3 chip.

HotHardware reports the Epic Games launcher is causing elevated CPU utilization when it's seemingly doing nothing. Furthermore, the site discovered the Epic Games launcher phones home significantly more than other launchers. The site noticed Epic Games sent over 514KB to some servers over the course of an hour, approximately 14x more than what Steam and NVIDIA GeForce Experience sent in the background during the same timeframe.