Amazon's New World MMO is reportedly killing $1,500 Nvidia GPUs
There are multiple reports of Amazon's New World MMO actually killing GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards. The closed beta just went live yesterday and already willing participants are finding that the much-delayed game is somehow bricking their seriously expensive hardware.
Hardware that's mighty tough to replace right now, let's not forget.
The reports have come through the New World subreddit (and crossposted in r/nvidia) after greyone78 posted about the dying of the light from their RTX 3090. But Twitter is also seeing some instances of dead GPUs too.
ATTENTION:Playing the New World beta on my EVGA 3090 has fried my graphics card completely. There are many accounts of this same thing happening with the same card with the same game.@TEAMEVGA @playnewworld @EVGA_JacobF I just want to make sure this doesn't happen to othersJuly 21, 2021
It's a crazy situation; software should not be able to just kill a piece of tech in 2021. There are meant to be a whole raft of fail safes built into your hardware which should stop it overheating, clocking too high, or drawing more power than it can handle. That's how come overclocking is pretty much fool-proof these days... if a little unrewarding.
But seemingly those fail safes aren't so safe in New World, with the game overheating GPUs and causing power spikes all over the place. The general consensus seems to be that it's down to uncapped frame rates in menu screens, with the graphics silicon getting far too excited and drawing too much juice through its VRMs and frying them.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened with Starcraft II being another culprit back in the day.
If you run New World either with a capped frame rate from the off, or with your GPU underclocked or undervolted, with a strict power limit engaged, there's a good chance you won't kill your expensive graphics card. But there's no way I'm going to try and dive into the New World beta and see if my RTX 3090 can handle it.
I'm all for pushing hardware to the limit, but y'know, there is a limit.
It does also seem to be an issue peculiar to EVGA cards at the moment, though New World is evidently pushing other GPUs too hard as well, with reports of unnecessarily high power usage in menu screens and stupidly high temperatures as a result.
Around the launch of Nvidia's RTX 30-series cards there were several reports of cards failing because of their power componentry not being up to the job. A lot of the blame was put on the capacitors, but VRMs got some blame too. EVGA itself noted that some of its early boards, those that went out to reviewers, had insufficiently capable capacitors, but they supposedly never got out into retail.
Nvidia salved these issues by releasing a driver that pulled back a little on the power front and since then we've not really seen any problems. Certainly with a PowerColor RTX 3080 we had which kept falling over before the patch, it was far happier after.
Best CPU for gaming: the top chips from Intel and AMD
Best graphics card: your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: get into the game ahead of the rest
I'd guess Amazon will learn its lesson—with Bezos back from space, and now such a man of action, he'll probably drop in a frame limiter himself.
But that's not a great look for New World, a title which is somewhat carrying the torch for Amazon in terms of its gaming credentials. It's not had a great track record after all, what with the dreadful Grand Tour game, shooter Crucible being released, unreleased, and then cancelled, and then brawler Breakaway going nowhere at all.
So, being the killer of GPUs amidst a GPU drought may be something that sticks with Amazon's new MMO even after launch.
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