Update: In a statement sent to PC Gamer today, Amazon says it has "observed no signs of widespread issues" with the RTX 3090, despite "a small number" of player reports of experiencing hardware glitches Amazon says the game is already safe to play playable, but they plan to release a patch to cap the fps of the menu screen to "reassure" players. Here is the full statement:

Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World closed beta yesterday, with millions of hours of total play time. We have received several reports of players with high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware glitches while playing New World.

New World makes standard DirectX calls provided by the Windows API. We have seen no indication of widespread problems with 3090, either in beta or in months of alpha testing.

New World Closed Beta is safe to play. To further reassure players, a patch will be implemented today to cap the number of frames per second on the menu screen. We appreciate the support New World has received from players around the world and will continue to listen to player feedback throughout the beta and beyond. The issue regarding [Nvidia RTX 3090 Series & 100% GPU Usage] was acknowledged by an Amazon customer service representative in a forum post. The developer recommends turning off "Override Driver Settings," but the only specific instructions are to set "Maximum Frame Rate" to "Off" in the Nvidia control panel (the default state) and rely on the frame rate limit option in the game.

Original Article Amazon's "New World" MMO closed beta was just released yesterday, but today there are multiple reports of GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards being dead in some form.

It is a very difficult piece of hardware to replace right now.

The reports come through the New World subreddit (cross-posted to r/nvidia) after greyone78 posted about the death of their RTX 3090. cases of GPU deaths have been seen on Twitter as well.

It's a strange situation. Software should not be able to kill a piece of technology in 2021. Hardware should have built-in failsafes to stop overheating, clocking too high, and consuming more power than it can process. Therefore, overclocking is almost a fail-safe these days.

However, in "New World," these failsafes do not seem to be so safe, and the game overheats the GPU, causing power spikes here and there. The general consensus seems to be that the uncapped frame rate on the menu screens is to blame, and that the graphics silicon is getting overexcited and supplying too much power to the VRMs, causing them to burn out.

This is not the first time something like this has happened: Starcraft II had something similar a long time ago.

If New World is run with the frame rate capped from the start, the GPU under-clocked or under-volted, or with strict power limits, there is a very good chance that the expensive graphics card will not die.

However, if this report is accurate, I'm not going to jump into the New World beta and try to see if my RTX 3090 can handle it until I get an update from Amazon or Nvidia as to what the cause is.

I'm all for pushing hardware to the limit, but there are limits.

Also, while the problem seems to be specific to EVGA's cards at this time, New World is apparently pushing other GPUs too hard, resulting in reports of unnecessarily high power usage and ridiculously high temperatures on the menu screen.

In other words, there is some debate as to whether it is a hardware issue or a game issue. One Reddit user says, "I ran into the same problem, EVGA 3090 FTW, 1000w+ power supply." I don't think this was a game problem, just a bad card waiting for the right conditions to fail."

"Add me to the list," wrote another. "EVGA 3090 FTW3 - works fine for about 30 minutes > black screen game audio still continues > fan rises to 100% right after black screen > hard reset, now no video."

Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the game itself is unrelated to this problem, since it is related to one particular game and is only a settings screen; we have asked both Amazon Game Studios and EVGA for answers to these issues.

Still, it's pretty heartbreaking when reddit is flooded with reports of cards dying during beta testing of a simple game: "There's been a rash of reports on reddit of cards dying during beta testing of a simple game. The first time I launched the game and clicked "Reset to Default" on the brightness calibration screen, all the fans went into overdrive and blasted off to Mars. The screen went black and the video output would not return. After a hard reset, the GPU would not turn on. Same card. evga 3090 ftw3. been using it since February, no problems."

Around the time Nvidia's RTX 30 series cards were released, there were several reports of cards failing due to underperforming power supply components. Much of the blame was placed on the capacitors, but the VRMs were also blamed; EVGA itself noted that some of the early boards (those distributed to reviewers) had capacitors that performed poorly, but were reportedly not available to retailers.

Nvidia solved these problems by releasing a driver that regressed a bit on the power side, and we have not really seen the problem since. Indeed, the PowerColor RTX 3080 we had kept falling over before the patch, but after the patch it was much more comfortable. [After returning from space, Bezos, being a man of action, will probably install a hard-coded frame limiter himself.

In terms of the game's reliability, however, it doesn't look good for "New World," a title that carries some of the Amazon torch. The Grand Tour was a terrible effort, and the shooter Crucible seemed to have been released, but was never released, and then cancelled.

So being a GPU killer in a GPU drought may haunt Amazon's new MMO even after its launch.