Players Say Amazon's ‘New World’ MMO Is Frying Their Expensive Video Cards

The Amazon Games developed MMO New World entered closed beta yesterday and players rushed to sign in. Some players who booted the game up on EVGA RTX 3090 graphics cards were met with a black screen. Many claimed that the new game had bricked their new, expensive, and almost impossible to obtain graphics cards, meaning they’d have to be replaced entirely.

Reports of the issue are widespread on Twitter, Reddit, and the New World forums but they all have a few common traits. They all stopped working after playing the game briefly and all had RTX 3090s manufactured by EVGA. 

“After hitting the play button for New World beta the game started to load, followed immediately by fan speeds increasing to 100%, fps dropping to 0, and then my monitors turning off and my video card is no longer detected,” player Goatz said in a post on the New World forums.

Goatz rebooted their PC and played a few games without issue then tried to load New World again. “This time I heard a loud pop and now my 3090 won’t get past POST on bootup,” he said. “This is the 2nd 3090 FTW3 Ultra directly from EVGA to die while playing or attempting to play New World. My first one died during Alpha, but I was able to play that for a week or so before that happened.”

The RTX 3090 is a powerful video card that retails for $2,000 and requires, at minimum, a 750W power supply. It’s the kind of card you get when you have too much money and want to future proof your PC as much as possible. They’re also hard to get thanks to bitcoin miners, scalpers, and the semiconductor shortage. Losing one is heartbreaking. 

It’s also probably not Amazon’s fault. The EVGA manufactured RTX 3090s are notoriously prone to failure. Reports of them bricking during games like League of Legends and other games are common. 

The early days of the 3000 series cards were plagued with reports of crashes to desktops, fried cards, and other issues. Curious customers took apart the cards and discovered, in some instances, 3rd party manufacturers using capacitors Nvidia hadn’t approved. At the time, EVGA claimed it had fixed the problem before a wide release and that it was only some review copies of their GPUS that went into the wild with bad capacitors.

Months after it said it resolved the capacitor issue, one of EVGA’s most powerful cards is failing trying to load the beta for a new video game. It’s a beta and the game isn’t optimized yet so it’s possible that New World is pushing the card to the point of failure in a way other games haven't, but other players are running the game fine on non-EVGA 3090s with no problem. 

“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,” Amazon Games told Motherboard in an email.

“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."

Nvidia and EVGA did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment.

UPDATE 7/21/21 4:45: This story has been updated with a comment from Amazon Games.