Amazon’s new world is killing expensive high-end GPUs

Amazon Games’ often-delayed MMO New world launched its closed beta yesterday ahead of its launch on August 31. Thousands of players clogged the historic fantasy game’s servers, causing long login queues in all of the game’s worlds. However, some players got a lot more than they expected, as reports did. state of high-end and hard-to-find EVGA RTX 3090 video cards that died while playing.

Imagine spending almost $ 2,000 (or more in the secondary market) for one of the most powerful graphics cards you can buy, start a whole new game and hear a “pop” sound when your screen goes black. This seems to be what happens to the owners of EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 graphics cards while playing the closed beta of New world. Reports of the combination of the game and the card causing a hardware failure appear on Reddit, at Steam, in EVGA forums, and in the official game forums. A user, who goes through Goatz on the New world forums, reported that they had an EVGA card dice in the game’s alpha test earlier this year. EVGA replaced the card, only to have him die again during the current closed beta.

So after pressing the play button for New world beta, the game started to load, immediately followed by an increase in fan speed to 100%, FPS dropping to 0, then my monitors shutting down and my video card was no longer detected. So I restarted the PC and everything seemed to be working fine. I even tried a few other games to make sure and didn’t have any issues. So I hit play New world again and the same happens but this time I heard a loud noise and now my 3090 will not go past POST on startup.

Goatz’s problem echoes that of other players whose EVGA 3090 cards have failed. Sometimes failure happens in the middle of reading. Other times it happens while waiting New worldthe connection queue of. Fans of graphics cards go into overdrive, which usually indicates a particularly heavy workload, and then the screen goes black. Some users report that they can restart after the black screen appears. Others describe a clicking noise, after which the graphics card does not work at all.

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Fortunately, the problem seems isolated on EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 cards. Nvidia GPUs are released in multiple models from many manufacturers, and the failures appear to be limited to the EVGA. Owners of other brands of RTX 3090 cards must be clear.

The issue being limited to a single card model also means that this is a hardware issue and not an issue with Amazon. New world in general. There seems to be some flaw in the FTW3 cards from EVGA, and New worldIt turns out that the environment has the right combination of settings and GPU calls to eliminate the problem. Kotaku contacted EVGA and Amazon Games for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

Note that New worldthe game support forum list a known problem with video cards reaching 99% GPU load during playback. The suggested fix is ​​to enable V-Sync for Nvidia-based cards or Radeon Enhanced Sync for AMD cards, which limits the game’s frame rate, preventing it from getting out of hand.

If you own an EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 card, congratulations on having one of the most powerful, hard-to-find graphics cards on the market on your computer. Bookmark The EVGA support page, and maybe avoid New world until the card maker understands what’s going on.