Epic Games Launcher abnormally active on PC when running in the background

Many players report abnormal usage of their CPU when the Epic Games Launcher is left open in the background, without any game being launched. A problem that we have also seen and which does not inspire any good.

Your processor heats up abnormally on the desktop, despite switching to idle. You would do well to manually mute the Epic Games Launcher if it is running in the background. Based on feedback from many users, corroborated by HotHardware and our own observations, the Epic Games launcher is unusually demanding on the CPU on Windows 10, even if no game is running.

First reported on Reddit by Neoncarbon, the proud owner of an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, the phenomenon results in a strangely high CPU temperature on the desktop, when the Epic Games Launcher is running in the background. When the software is cut, this value drops back down to a normal level, in many cases more than ten degrees less.

The specialized site experienced this on one of its test platforms, equipped with a Ryzen 9 5950X (cooled by a water-cooling system) and an RTX 3080. With the Epic Games Launcher active, the processor reached 53 degrees in idle (with 2% use of the chip and its 16 cores by Epic’s launcher alone). Through the task manager, it was then possible to watch the Epic Games Launcher use cores and keep some of them running without any game being downloading updates in the background.

We were also able to observe abnormal activity on two processors available to us, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and an Intel Core i7-7700K. In the first case, we noted a temperature of 59.6 degrees in idle, against 46.8 degrees after the Epic Games Store cut. A drop in temperature visible in the screenshots above (with a difference of only 27 seconds between the two captures).

Same dynamic with the Core i7-7700K, with between 50 and 55 degrees raised when the Epic Games Launcher was active in the background, and only 35 to 40 degrees when the latter was manually deactivated.

(Via)