Amazon's New World is bricking RTX GPU — what you need to know

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New World, same old problems

New World screenshot.
(Image credit: Amazon)

Amazon Game Studios’ immensely popular new MMO New World launched this week, bringing with it some hilarious naming restrictions and shattered Steam records. However, it appears that records aren’t all that are being shattered — anecdotal reports of GPU bricking have started cropping up across the internet. 

According to our sister-site PC Gamer, the latest report of New World bricking GPUs comes only a few months after the game’s beta destroyed some users’ fancy new GeForce RTX 3090s. Like with the outcome of that fateful test run, players across the globe are experiencing crashes and subsequent card failure during gameplay, which is an even bigger bummer considering how difficult it is to even find decent GPUs right now. 

During July’s beta, the issue appeared to be limited primarily to EVGA cards and only happened during New World’s menus, which featured uncapped framerates. EVGA quickly responded with an admission that some poor smoldering on certain cards had contributed to them burning out from drawing too much power, and the company promptly replaced the bricked GPUs. It was assumed that there wouldn’t be any further complications, especially since Amazon stepped in and capped the framerate in menus as a precaution.

Reports of GPU bricking in the full release, though, indicate that the problem is affecting more than just EVGA cards. Even with capped framerates, players are publicizing failures in cards from a variety of manufacturers, including multiple cases of Gigabyte RTX 3090s biting the dust.

Testing from some major outlets haven’t been able to replicate the bricking process, but WinFuture reports that trigger points are rampant and can put extra burden on the card and cause crashes. WinFuture even states that its Gigabyte RTX 3090 was fried by merely closing out the game, saying, “The fans howl to 100 percent, the screen goes black, the PC says goodbye.”

Most other reports from around the net indicate that these complications are arising from altering graphical settings, as the game tends to want to draw the entire scene from scratch after any changes. This can sometimes cause the GPU to hit 100% load, though that shouldn’t necessarily immediately spell disaster, unless the card is defective in some way.

So, if you’re checking out New World this week, what does all of this mean for you? We don’t fully know yet, but these headaches do appear to be resulting from problematic GPUs rather than the software itself. Though, it may not be what you want to hear. Your safest choice might be to hold off from diving into this fresh MMO world for now until all of the confusion dies down and answers become more clear. 

Billy Givens
Billy Givens

Billy Givens is a journalist with nearly two decades of experience in editing and writing across a wide variety of topics. He focuses particularly on games coverage for Tom's Guide and other sites including From Gamers Magazine, Retroware, Game Rant and TechRaptor. He's also written for self-improvement sites such as Lifehack and produced in-depth analyses on subjects such as health, psychology and entertainment.