An increasing number of Escape From Tarkov players are reporting a bizarre new cheat that’s plaguing the extraction shooter. Dubbed the ‘CPU fryer,’ this new exploit lures players in with audio only to completely tank their frame rate and crash their game, leading to easy kills.
Cheaters are the bane of every FPS game player’s existence – and every FPS game developer’s existence, for that matter. Some titles fare better than others when it comes to banning cheaters swiftly or keeping them out of the game to begin with, and one that’s always been fairly troubled is Escape From Tarkov. It may be the godfather of extraction shooters, but debates and complaints about the level of cheaters seem to bubble up every few months.
Battlestate Games announced towards the end of last year that it had banned around 28,000 cheaters in a roughly four month period between June and October – a figure that shows the developer being aggressive with capturing bad actors, but also highlights the scale of the problem.
The latest (and potentially weirdest) cheat to hit Escape From Tarkov was first discussed a few days ago, but over the last 24 hours or so reports of players being hit by it appear to be increasing if you take a look at forums and social media.
Hey @bstategames @tarkov @nikgeneburn This is getting pretty unacceptable. Just had my entire PC locked up, had to alt F4 my game.
THIS IS NOT OK. pic.twitter.com/vvAnkcHvDj
— Baddie 🤬 (@BaddieStreams) January 10, 2025
The ‘CPU fryer’ doesn’t actually harm your hardware, but what it does do is attract you in with spammed audio cues and then mysteriously cause your fps to tank dramatically before usually crashing your game. This renders you unable to move and shoot back at the cheating player who can then swoop in for an easy elimination and help themselves to your loot. I’ve read a large Reddit post explaining the exact technicalities of this cheat that has since been deleted by moderators, but won’t be sharing any of the specifics here.
PCGamesN has also reached out to Battlestate for comment on if it knows about this new exploit and if there’s a timeline for getting it fixed so players can be protected from it.
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