Reddit user Neoncarbon noticed that the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X’s idle temperature dropped from 50 ° C to 37 ° C when he simply closed the app. HotHardware reporters repeated the experiment on their own, as you can see from the screenshots. Other play store apps like GOG and Steam do not exhibit this behaviour.

The initial posting of Neoncarbon on Reddit received over 10,000 votes and over a thousand comments, with people actively sharing similar experiences, noting the decrease in load after the Epic Games Launcher closed. It looks like anyone with an Epic Games client running in the background is facing rising CPU temperatures and higher utilization. But this is especially evident on Ryzen processors.

HotHardware ran one of their test benches based on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X liquid-cooled and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. In the first image, you can see that the processor temperature reaches 53 ° C and there is about 2% utilization on the 16-core Zen processor 3 while Epic Games is running.

Reporters noted that Epic Games Launcher loads many kernels even when it seemingly does nothing, and does not update the game in the background.

While doing a little testing on another PC, the journalists noticed that Epic Games Launcher opens five different processes at the same time. Out of curiosity, they used the Glasswire utility to monitor network traffic. It turned out that the application and its associated processes were sending data at regular intervals to 22 different servers. This happens regardless of whether the program is open, minimized, or in the background. Larger spikes occur immediately after Epic Games Launcher launches, which is understandable.

Interestingly, even EpicWebHelper sends some data to the following address: