Update July 21st, 8:11PM ET: After we first published this story, Amazon provided the following statement confirming it is looking into two customer service reports related to 3090 failures due to New World:
We have two customer service reports on this that we are following up on, and some reports of high GPU usage from forums, which is consistent with a graphically rich game. We do provide user select-able settings to reduce graphics, which correspondingly reduces GPU load, if the player desires.
The original story is below.
The closed beta for Amazon Games’ new MMO New World has been marred by reports that the game has bricked some players’ Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics cards. In a statement shared Wednesday, Amazon says that it has seen “no indication of widespread issues with 3090s,” but will be releasing a patch anyway.
Here’s Amazon’s full statement shared with The Verge on Wednesday:
Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played. We’ve received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World.
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.
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.
The language in Amazon’s statement doesn’t completely rule out that the game may be causing problems, though. In particular, the phrasing “no indication of widespread issues” (emphasis ours) suggests there could be some issues, and since we don’t know how broadly or narrowly Amazon is defining “widespread,” we can’t be sure how many cards the company has determined may be affected.
Many of the bricked cards appear to be manufactured by EVGA, based on reports in a thread on the New World subreddit. And issues with EVGA cards may run earlier than the beta, as one player on the New World forums said they’ve had one EVGA card die on them during the game’s alpha and one die during this beta.
EVGA didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment, but a company representative told Windows Central that “at the moment we are dealing with specific problems, if it is a problem really confirmed we will inform and inform you in our EVGA forums on our website.” But if you’ve got a 3090 card of any kind, you might want to wait to play the game until Amazon’s patch is out just in case.
The New World closed beta runs through August 2nd. If you want to try it, you can pre-ordering the game to get an invite or sign up for an opportunity to get access via this page. The game is set to release on August 31st following numerous delays.
