Amazon responds to reports New World MMO is bricking RTX 3090s [Update]
Amazon has responded to reports that the New World closed beta is causing a major problem with RTX 3090 GPUs.
Update: Amazon has issued a statement in response to reports from many players that suggest New World is killing their RTX 3090 GPUs. The company said that hardware failure reports are a fraction of the overall player base, and not widespread. Nevertheless, the developer is releasing a patch to cap the framerate in the menus.
"Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World closed beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played. We’ve received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World," said Amazon Games.
"New World makes standard DirectX calls as provided by the Windows API. We have seen no indication of widespread issues with 3090s, either in the beta or during our many months of alpha testing. The New World closed neta is safe to play. In order to further reassure players, we will implement a patch today that caps frames per second on our menu screen. We’re grateful for the support New World is receiving from players around the world, and will keep listening to their feedback throughout Beta and beyond."
You can read the original story below.
Original story: Amazon brought back its upcoming MMO, New World, for one last closed beta test ahead of the official release at the end of August. A number of systems in the game have been tuned for this test, based on feedback - but no one at Amazon Games expected to be dealing with this problem.
According to multiple user reports (via PC Gamer), New World appears to be killing RTX 3090 GPUs - you know, the most expensive GPUs on the market today, and that's without factoring in scalpers or the current crisis. Twitch streamer Gladd tweeted about this earlier today, linking to a a thread on New World's official forums where a number of other players are reporting the same issue.
Similar reports can be found on New World's subreddit, where some, also with RTX 3090 GPUs, are no longer able to use them after playing the game.
Most of these reports talk about the game's menus overheating the cards, which causes them to shutdown. The theory is that the menu's uncapped framerate is responsible for this. Though that usually only results in GPUs getting a bit hotter/fans spinning faster, it seems New World pushes this over the edge, to the point that cards draw too much power and kill their voltage regulators (VRMs).
The other curious point in these reports is that almost all of them are affecting EVGA cards. While the overheating problem is present on GPUs from other brands, it appears that EVGA owners are suffering the worst of it. This is interesting because EVGA (and other manufactures) ran into a similar problem with power delivery components around the launch of the RTX 30-series cards.
The problem was later fixed with an Nvidia driver that brought stability back to those GPUs, and everyone assumed it was gone for good. If you're going to be playing New World, you should probably limit your GPU's power draw, or underclock/undervolt it. You could also try limiting the game's framerate.
We've reached out to Amazon Games and will update this story when we hear back.