Amazon responds to RTX 3090 New World nightmare: How to avoid a bricked GPU [Update]

It’s been a rough day for some unfortunate PC gamers. Amazon’s upcoming MMO, New World, entered closed beta yesterday, and it didn’t take long before some participants reported that the game bricked their GPUs. These weren’t aging GPUs trying to run a game beyond their capability, but rather top-of-the-line RTX 3090 GPUs.

Most of the reports seem to suggest that the EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra is having the most problems, though there have been user reports that suggest other GPUs are vulnerable as well. After some speculation from the player base about what could be causing the issue – players think it’s uncapped framerate in menus exacerbating a power delivery design flaw in these GPUs – Amazon has now responded to the claims and given users some tips on how to avoid damaging their hardware.

In a post to the New World forums, an Amazon customer service rep explains that the studio believes the issue “is related with driver settings and frame rate limiters.” First, it’s recommended that users disable the overrides in their driver settings, hit “Apply,” and then restart the game client.

Beyond that, Amazon also suggests capping FPS to stop issues with the GPU’s utilization. To do that, go into the game’s settings, then the “Visuals” menu, set the Max FPS option to “60.” Finally, Amazon suggests double-checking in the NVIDIA Control Panel that the Max Frame Rate setting for New World shows either “Use Global Settings (Off)” or “Off.”

The hope is that these fixes solve the problem entirely because this is a costly issue to encounter – not to mention one that’s made more complicated by the fact that these top-end GPUs are incredibly difficult to find at the moment. We’ll see if users report ongoing GPU issues with New World now that Amazon has detailed some fixes, so stay tuned.

Update: Amazon has now issued a statement regarding reports of bricked GPUs. “Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played,” Amazon said in a statement to SlashGear. “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.”

So, not only do we have the tips listed above, but now this statement also confirms that Amazon will implement a patch that puts a hard cap on framerate while in menus. Hopefully that’s the end of any GPU issues players have while running New World.