Amazon responds after reports its MMO New World is bricking pricey RTX 3090 cards

UPDATE 22ND JULY 2021: Amazon Games has issued a new statement on New World and recent concerns with graphics cards, announcing a patch to cap the framerate on the MMO's menu screen.

In the statement, Amazon said it had 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 statement continues.

"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."

Please read this message regarding recent concerns with graphics cards hardware. pic.twitter.com/L1gNeBBPQS

ORIGINAL STORY 21ST JULY 2021: Yesterday saw the beta launch of Amazon's much-delayed MMO New World, and early gameplay reports have been generally positive. Considerably less positive, however, are the increasing number of posts from players saying New World has also successfully managed to brick their pricey RTX 3090s graphics cards - an issue Amazon has now gone some way to acknowledging on its official support forum.

Word of New World's potentially hardware-busting abilities first surfaced on the MMO's dedicated sub-reddit. "I just bricked a 3090 in the main menu after setting my graphics quality to medium and hitting save," wrote user greyone78. "Cant believe it. Anyone else had a catastrophic failure like this?"

Multiple responses seem to confirm that, yes, this isn't an isolated issue, and further reports of RTX 3090 malfunctions after playing New World (primarily seeming to impact cards made by EVGA) began to spread to Twitter and beyond, along with speculation the problem may be the result of power spikes and overheating caused by uncapped framerates in the game's menus.

For a while, Amazon remained silent on the issue, but a post from a customer service rep over on New World's Game Support forum has now acknowledged the MMO can cause 100 percent GPU usage on EVGA RTX 3090 graphics cards, pointing the finger of blame at "driver settings and framerate limiters".

The rep offered two solutions in their post, suggesting RTX 3090 users disable overrides in their card's driver settings and cap their FPS to 60 in the visuals settings before restarting the New World game client. "This will help prevent issues with the GPU's utilisation," explained the rep.

In response to the post, some users have suggested overheating and crashing issues persist (on a range of different cards, not just the EVGA model specified) even with default settings enabled and the framerate capped at 60fps. As such, owners of high-end graphics cards may still want to exercise a degree of caution and wait for further updates from Amazon if they're considering putting New World's beta through its paces.

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