Epic Games Launcher Receives Partial Hotfix For High CPU Utilization Bug

Following last week’s outcry, Sergey Galyonkin, Epic Games director of publishing strategy, confirmed that the high CPU utilization is a bug in the software and that a fix was currently in testing. That fix is now available... well, at least a partial fix is available according to Galyonkin. 

The hotfix has been incorporated into Epic Games Launcher v11.0.2, and it should help reduce CPU utilization in some, but not all scenarios. A "full solution" is presumably in the works, but Galyonkin has not yet confirmed when that particular hotfix will arrive.

So far, the hotfix appears to be working for some people. Redditor Capital_Bad says that their CPU utilization dropped from as high as 2% down to as low as 0.1% after the hotfix was installed. The resultant CPU temperature also fell from 60C to 40C. However, another user, Bond4141, explained that the hotfix did nothing for their system, and CPU utilization still stands at 7% at idle with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 processor. Hockeyfrank26 added, "Nope, still spiking between 1.6% and 2.6% and making my thermals on my Ryzen 5950x go haywire."

Some, however, decided to inject humor into the situation as users reported their successes (and failures) with the hotfix, as Duke_Shambles quipped, "You can make it use 0% of your system resources by uninstalling it." Touché!

In addition, our own testing last week found that the Epic Games Launcher was sending off quite a bit of data traffic to multiple servers while systems were idling. EpicWebHelper was found to be shuttling more than 14 times the amount of data attributed to similar Steam and GeForce Experience clients.

With this partial fix now out, let us know in the comments section if you've seen a reduction in CPU utilization (and temperatures), or if things are haven't changed at all for you. Whatever your situation, hopefully the full fix is right around the corner.