In late July 2021, a beta period for Amazon Games' new MMORPG, New World, caused some graphics cards to die. The lack of a framerate cap was initially blamed for killing a small number of RTX 3090 cards, mainly those from EVGA, but that really didn't make much sense. After all, tons of games can run with uncapped framerates and they don't cause PC hardware to die.
Amazon Games did introduce a framerate cap on the main menus as a precaution while the matter was looked into. Both Amazon Games and EVGA started internal investigations into the matter. Meanwhile, tech enthusiasts all over began speculating as to what the issue was.
On September 1, EVGA told PCWorld that it was a manufacturing issue that caused the cards to die. They admitted that it was "a rare soldering issue" that was "limited to a small batch of cards." Specifically, it seems as though it was "poor workmanship" on the soldering around the card's MOSFETs. For their part, EVGA did issue immediate replacement hardware to those who had their cards die as a result of playing New World. The company said they had to replace only a couple dozen cards, which isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things.
So, the problem was solved, right? Well, maybe not.
Two days ago, a new Reddit thread popped up from a user saying that New World caused their GPU to die. This time, the user had a Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti. Some other anecdotal reports were made to PowerGPU, but nothing really seems conclusive one way or another.
Does this mean it's time to panic again? Eh, probably not. Keep in mind that when this happened in the beta, only about 24 cards had to be replaced by EVGA. Then you factor in the fact that there's only anecdotal reports about this supposed new issue thus far. You have maybe a handful of potential issues out of the several hundred thousand people who are playing New World since its release. If there was an issue with the game itself, you would expect that there would be far, far more reports by now.
PC Gamer began their own investigation into the matter. Through all of their testing, none of their hardware encountered any issue with the game.
In our testing Alan has noticed that when changing the graphics settings the game does go through a hard refresh, where the engine seems to want to draw the whole scene again, from low poly models, adding more and more detail from there. That seems to put a lot of strain on your system, often hitting 100% GPU load just from switching around some graphics options.
It does bear saying that we've not seen a card fall over in our experience yet, and a lot of people on the team have been playing New World out of morbid curiosity. There's also the fact that even under 100% load your GPU should be able to cope, which again speaks to potentially already existing, underlying factors in the manufacturing of the graphics cards that have actually bricked as a result of running the game.
It does bear saying that we've not seen a card fall over in our experience yet, and a lot of people on the team have been playing New World out of morbid curiosity. There's also the fact that even under 100% load your GPU should be able to cope, which again speaks to potentially already existing, underlying factors in the manufacturing of the graphics cards that have actually bricked as a result of running the game.
So if there is something going on again, it could very well be another manufacturing error. However, there just isn't enough evidence to go "yes, this is an issue and this is what's happening." It has all been a bunch of anecdotal reports thus far and it may just be a huge coincidence for those few people that have allegedly reported issues.
