Epic Games Store’s high idle CPU usage has gamers questioning what app is doing
The Epic Games Store, aka that place you get free games every now and then, has been a point of contention for PC gamers for a couple years now. Now it seems the issues over data gathering are once again coming back to haunt them.
Reddit user Neoncarbon noted that his AMD Ryzen 7 5800X was running oddly warm at around 50c while the computer was idling. However, by disabling the Epic Games Store launcher, he saw his temps drop to a more reasonable 37c. The thread on r/AMD has reached over 10,000 upvotes, with most responders saying they’d experienced a similar problem. Some claiming CPU usage as high as 10% when the app was running in the background, supposedly doing nothing.
Hot Hardware was able to replicate the issue on their liquid-cooled Ryzen 9 test rig, seeing their temps spike to 53c with the EGS utilizing about 2% of CPU resources. Upon closer inspection, the launcher seems be hammering a couple cores particularly hard. So processors with lower core counts will likely see higher usage.
That amount of resource consumption is abnormally high for an app of its type. Even notoriously demanding web browsers like Chrome will rarely use that much when just displaying static webpages. Which has many people asking what exactly the Epic Games Store is doing when it’s not supposed to be doing anything.
Hot Hardware dug a little deeper to examine the app’s web traffic. Using Glasswire, they found it sending data at regular intervals to over 22 different servers while running in the background. It had sent in total about 514KB over the course of an hour. Which doesn’t sound like a lot. However, Hot Hardware noted that neither Steam nor Nvidia’s GeForce Experience transmitted anywhere near as much data during their tests.
The problem doesn’t seem to be limited to AMD processors either. At least one commentator on the article noted that they had seen similar CPU usage on their Core i7.
This is not the first time the Epic Games Store app has been accused of suspicious activity. Shortly after launch, it was alleged to be collecting a whole host of user data. Something which the company has denied. However, their ties to Chinese Communist Party aligned megacorp Tencent continues to dog them. Epic Games had yet to comment on the issue at the time of writing.
