Culture

Amazon’s ambitious, lavish, 1600s-set MMO New World is reportedly bricking $2000 graphics cards

Jul 23 2021
Written by Ed Nightingale

New World. (Amazon)

Amazon has just released the closed beta for their brand new MMO New World, but it appears to be bricking certain graphics cards.

The New World beta is already incredibly popular, with thousands of players queueing up and long login queues.

However, some players are reporting their EVGA RTX 3090 graphics cards are going dead during play.

The high-end GPUs cost close to $2,000 and are among the most powerful on the market.

Multiple reports on Reddit claim the game is causing a hardware failure, be it while playing, while watching cutscenes, or simply while loading the game.

For some the screen goes black but they’re able to reload. For others, there’s a popping sound and the GPU is totally dead.

The issue appears to be isolated to this particular EVGA model, meaning it’s a hardware issue and not a problem with New World.

However, the New World forum does list a known issue with video cards reaching 99% GPU capacity – it suggests enabling V-Sync for Nvidia-based cards or Radeon Enhanced Sync for AMD cards to limit the game’s frame rate.

Amazon has since released an official statement on the issue to Kotaku.

“We’ve received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World,” it reads.

“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.”

While not addressing the EVGA cards directly, capping frame rates should have a positive impact across all graphics cards.

New World is a fantasy MMO set in the mid-1600s with players colonising a fictional land based on colonial America. It’s due for full release on 31 August.