Update 4:16 p.m. ET: Amazon has issued a response and we've included more info below.
If you’re lucky enough to own an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, the most powerful and expensive of the Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, you may want to stay away from Amazon’s New World MMO.
A number of users on Reddit, all GeForce RTX 3090 owners, have reported that the recently-launched New World closed beta doesn’t just crash on their graphics cards — it bricks the $1,499 component entirely.
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Users on the official New World forum have reported the same issue: GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs completely frying, even after just a short time playing the beta. Gladd, a Twitch streamer with over 438,000 followers, tweeted that his card had suffered the same fate.
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
Amazon has issued a response on the New World support forum, which says that this is issue is likely related to driver settings and frame rate limiters. It also says to disable the overrides in the driver settings and provides other steps gamers can take.
Most complaints seem to involve EVGA-made versions of the GeForce RTX 3090, particularly the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra. However, at this stage it’s not clear what exactly is causing such catastrophic failures: it could be a manufacturing defect on the card, or New World itself, or a potential firmware problem. Some affected users have said that after removing the bricked GPU and replacing it with a completely different graphics card, the beta ran without further trouble.
Whatever the underlying cause, our advice to GeForce RTX 3090 owners — regardless of which exact model they own — is to avoid New World for now. Yes, it’s a time-limited closed beta, and from the number of the visible complaints it doesn’t seem like every GeForce RTX 3090 is suffering.
But given this graphics card is both very expensive and hard to find in stock, the latter almost to the extent of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, it doesn’t look to be remotely worth the risk. Some users may be able to get a replacement unit under warranty, but then does it not seem better to just avoid destroying your top-end graphics card in the first place?
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