Amazon was quick to react to the New World: video card killer case, but this won’t help those who spent a lot of money on a high-end video card…

Amazon‘s new MMO, New World, has a subreddit, and on it, a few people complained about how it can brick your PC’s graphics card. It affected especially those who own an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, which costs at least 1500 USD (and in our region, make that at least (!) over 2600, and we wish we weren’t joking), as it’s a high-end GPU.

Here’s a tweet of an unlucky player: „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. I just want to make sure this doesn’t happen to others.” And PowerGPU quickly offered a solution on how to avoid the situation: „Breaking: For people playing New World please cap your FPS. This will help prevent any issues that people have been having with their GPU’s being fried. Go to Settings > Visuals > Max FPS > Set this to 60, this will bring the utilization back down.”

Nowadays, we can expect a program to not be a graphics card killer, but in this case, it seemed that Amazon has made a mistake by having uncapped FPS in the menu screens, which caused the RTX 3090 cards, mainly manufactured by EVGA, to be utilised far more than necessary, leading to requiring more power, overloading the whole card in the process after 100% usage. And in a time where there are shortages, it can be especially painful…

Amazon has responded to the situation with a statement to PCGamer: „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. 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,” Amazon wrote.

We have still yet to ask how could this even happen?

Source: PCGamer