author: Iltutmis
New World Beta Literally Burns RTX 3090 GPUs; Amazon Responds
The closed beta of New World, an upcoming MMORPG from Amazon Games, began on July 20. Owners of RTX 3090 GPUs need to be careful, as the game destroyed some users' cards during testing.
- During the beta, New World destroyed the expensive GPUs of a group of players;
- The source of the problem may be voltage spikes and card overheating related to the uncapped fps generated by the game;
- Amazon has published a post on the issue and announced the release of a patch to fix this problem and a number of others.
The day before yesterday, users registered for the closed beta started their adventure in Amazon's new MMORPG New World. Player reactions to the content have been positive so far, although tests have brought with them problems and reasons to worry for owners of expensive RTX 3090 GPUs.
Burning GPUs
The first cases of burned graphics cards were published on a dedicated New World subreddit .
"I just bricked a 3090 in the main menu after setting my graphics quality to medium and hitting save. Cant believe it. Anyone else had a catastrophic failure like this?," wrote greyone78.
Twitter has begun to warn players of the game's disturbing effects on hardware.
There were many more cases like that experienced by user greyone78. The problem most often concerned graphics cards made by EVGA. Speculation started on Twitter led players to the conclusion that the source of the failure could be voltage spikes and overheating of the card related to the uncapped fps that the game could generate.
Amazon's response
Amazon did not comment on the matter for some time, but finally a customer service representative on the game's forum admitted that the new MMO can cause damage to EVGA RTX 3090 graphics cards, blaming driver settings and incorrect fps limits.
Amazon's employee suggested two solutions. First, to protect their cards RTX 3090 owners can disable the card's driver overrides, and second, they can set a 60 fps cap in the settings. According to a customer service representative, this should prevent GPU issues.
Amazon, in a message sent to PC Gamer yesterday, stated that it has not seen many cases of burned GPUs. The company assured that it will release a patch in the near future to fix, among other things, issues with uncapped fps. You can read Amazon's entire message below:
"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.
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 Beta 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."
New World players pointed out that the above solutions don't fix the overheating problem with the cards, and GPUs from other manufacturers also get damaged. Until Amazon gets the situation under control, all users of EVGA RTX 3090 and similar cards should be on their guard and consider whether it's worth the risk to participate in New World's beta. It would be a shame to lose such hardware considering its price and current low availability on the market.
