Update: Wednesday, July 21 6:12PM - Amazon has issued a statement, and has capped the frame rate of New World in Menus which should stop these problems. Here is the statement
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.
Original Story below
If you're in the New World beta, be on the lookout: some users are reporting that the game is bricking their GPUs. The problem seems to be predominantly affecting the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3090 EVGA model, but the issue isn't limited to that card, or that particular partner version.
Why is the New World beta bricking GPUs?
After the New World beta launched yesterday, users began to report problems with their graphics cards when playing the game. Players say that loading up New World causes their GPU fans to spin at 100% speed, followed by a complete shutdown of the card. In some cases, a reboot seems to help, although one particularly unfortunate user reports rebooting their PC, starting up New World again, and completely frying their graphics card. That's not even the only instance of the game rendering a GPU unusable, either.
The problem seems to be chiefly occurring in EVGA RTX 3090 cards, but it's not limited to them by any means. Users have also reported issues when playing on a GTX 970, as well as other manufacturers' versions of the RTX 3090. The issue seems to be that New World is causing graphics cards to run far beyond their intended load, which should be triggering the "panic mode"-style emergency shutdown these cards effect when overheating. However, for some reason, that feature isn't kicking in with New World, which causes the card to overheat irreparably.
What's causing this problem?
The best guess among users who have experienced this problem seems to be the uncapped frame rate. It seems that when the frame rate is uncapped, there's no limit on the rate, which means it simply keeps on climbing and climbing without any kind of hard cap. Obviously, even if you've got an RTX 3090, running New World at 1000fps isn't going to feel good for your GPU, and that goes double for less powerful cards, as they rack up the four-digit FPS' in the queue and menus.
Users are suggesting that one way to circumvent this problem is to cap the game to 60fps. Reddit user Drakaris says their GPU and CPU temperatures were incredibly high when playing New World, but that locking the game to 60fps worked to lower those temperatures (which, at their peak, were around 80 degrees Celsius for the GPU and 85 for the CPU). This would seem to corroborate the idea that it's the uncapped frame rate that's causing this chaos.
Has Amazon responded to this issue?
At the time of writing, there's been no word from Amazon Studios about New World bricking GPUs. The game's Twitter account mentions maintenance performed on the servers earlier today, but that was to address lengthy login queues rather than any performance issues. It's worth mentioning that this problem has only been reported in the last few hours, and that the New World beta hasn't been live for too long, so we may well hear something from Amazon if this issue persists.
We'll bring you more on New World bricking GPUs as soon as we get it. At the moment, the only way to prevent this issue (and not to fix it if it's already happened, unfortunately) seems to be to impose a frame rate cap of 60fps. You may not want to do that with a shiny new card like the 3090, but it's certainly preferable to not being able to use it at all. Stay tuned for more info.
Have you been experiencing problems with New World? Let us know in the comments below!
