Epic has released a patch in response to reports that the Epic Games Store launcher is consuming CPU resources, resulting in increased system temperatures on some PCs. However, the patch is "not a complete solution" and may cause CPU usage and temperatures to increase when the launcher is idle.

The issue was brought to attention in a Reddit post by user Neoncarbon, who claimed that disabling the launcher caused his AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU temperature to drop from 50°C to 37°C. Other users in the thread have made similar claims.

"Looking at my 5900X, it got to 64C just browsing YouTube .... .closed the Epic Games launcher and it dropped 20°C," another user wrote.

The folks at HotHardware were able to "confirm this unusual activity" on one of their AMD Ryzen testbeds running a liquid-cooled Ryzen 9 5950X CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. In one of the images posted with no launcher running, Windows Task Manager shows CPU utilization at 1%, and the Ryzen Master utility shows CPU temperature at 34.28°C.

In the second image, taken with the launcher running in the background, CPU utilization is shown as 7% and the CPU temperature jumps to 56.78°C.

"Looking at the task manager, the site notes that the Epic Games launcher lights up the cores, and even though it appears to be doing nothing, some of the cores remain lit and are not updating the game in the background."

It also states that the launcher was "sending data at regular intervals to over 22 different servers," regardless of whether the launcher was in the foreground, background, or minimized.

The same behavior was not observed when launching other game store apps, such as Steam or GOG (except when the app was first loaded); according to Epic's Sergiy Galyonkin, this was due to a "bug" in the launcher.

According to Sergiy, the currently released 11.0.2 hotfix does not completely fix this problem, but "the situation should improve. To apply, go to the Settings section and you will see it at the top. You can also download the latest build from Epic and reinstall the launcher.