After several complaints about Amazon’s New World — specifically, the fact that it was apparently causing several expensive GPUs to break — not only is EVGA saying it’ll replace the damaged components, but Amazon has also patched the game so that it hopefully won’t happen again. It’s odd that it even happened in the first place, but it appears that this is at least being corrected before it happens to more gamers.
New World is Amazon’s new RPG that mysteriously became the game of choice for several major Twitch streamers shortly after it came out. It’s currently in closed beta, meaning that only some players can join up. However, among that rather limited pool, a strange thing happened: Multiple players reported that their Geforce RTX 3090 GPUs, some of the best graphics cards out there, were bricked by New World. Several users reported the problem to the New World subreddit, and Twitch streamer Gladd said on Twitter: “Playing the New World beta on my EVGA 3090 has fried my graphics card completely.”
It’s very odd, to say the least. Even if a game is so graphically demanding that the GPU can’t handle it, it shouldn’t completely break the GPU. So far no one has exactly discovered why this happens, but Amazon released a patch for the game today that will “reduce GPU load in menu screens by clamping FPS” without affecting the game’s settings. This is in spite of the fact that it promises that the game “is safe to play” and it’s “seen no indication of widespread issues with 3090s.”
PC Gamer reports that EVGA intends to replace all of the 3090s that were allegedly destroyed by New World. It also cites YouTuber JayzTwoCents, who says his contacts at EVGA have told him that replacement cards are already being sent out. He also later tweeted that the issue is not confined to 3090s, but given how expensive and hard to find they are, it makes sense that their destruction is causing the biggest uproar.
