Amazon MMO New World Is Possibly Still Bricking Some GPUs

Amazon’s colonialist resource extraction MMO, New World, is currently the hottest new game on Steam, quite literally in some instances. More than a few players are reporting loud fans and high graphics card temperatures while running the game, and occasionally even just while queueing for it. And then there are the reports of the game bricking expensive GPUs altogether.

“We have people sending in emails that their GPUs are no longer working after playing New World,” custom PC builder website PowerGPU wrote on Twitter yesterday, as first spotted by PC Gamer. “All this means is they didn’t play the beta and we were anticipating those that didn’t to have the same issues.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New World’s PC requirements are nothing too demanding, even for an MMO. But the game can be a resource hog, taking full advantage of higher-end components when they’re available. This problem cropped up over the summer during New World’s beta, leading more than one EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 card to get cooked in the process.

Amazon pushed out a patch to cap New World’s framerate in an effort to keep GPU loads in line, but the real culprit appeared to be manufacturing defects in the particular series of cards affected, as EVGA later explained in an interview. The cards were doomed to fail at some point; New World just happened to be the canary in the GPU mine, so to speak.

That’s why PowerGPU now says it was expecting this to happen once more players with potentially faulty graphics cards started giving New World a try. It’s not just EVGA GeForce RTX 3090s either. Gigabyte cards appear to be in the mix as well. “My ‘Gigabyte 3080 Ti OC’ was destroyed by New World has the bug been patched yet?” wrote one player on the game’s subreddit. There are several other anecdotal reports of cards bricking there, as well as general complaints about spikes in GPU temperatures when playing.

Even if New World isn’t the direct culprit, it’s still unfortunate for the folks involved. While it’s better to find out there are production issues in a $2,000 card while it’s still under warranty, ongoing inventory shortages and supply chain issues mean sellers aren’t exactly drowning in replacement parts. In the meantime, New World players can take the extra precaution of making sure their graphics card firmware and drivers are up to date, and that the game’s framerate is capped in the settings menu.