EVGA has confirmed that it will be replacing each of its Geforce RTX 3090 graphics cards that were affected by the closed beta of Amazon’s New World MMO. “Yes, all failed 3090’s are being replaced," said a spokesperson to PC Gamer. A number of players who tried out the game’s closed beta complained about their graphics cards getting bricked, EVGA RTX 3090 cards in particular.
While the exact issue wasn’t known at the time, Amazon came out and said that there was no relation between the graphic card issues and the New World closed beta. “Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played," said Amazon, "We've received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World.”
The statement further said that New World makes standard DirectX calls as provided by the Windows API and that it has seen no indication of widespread issues with EVGA RTX 3090s during the closed beta or during many months of alpha testing.
Despite claiming that there were no issues from the game’s side, Amazon did put out an update to alleviate the concerns that players may be having. "The New World Closed Beta is safe to play," Amazon stated, "In order to further reassure players, we will implement a patch today that caps frames per second on our menu screen. We're grateful to the support New World is receiving from players around the world and will keep listening to their feedback throughout Beta and beyond."
For players still facing issues, Amazon further added, "We believe this is related with driver settings and frame rate limiters, Nvidia RTX 3090 series, and 100% GPU usage." Players were then advised to disable the overrides in the driver settings and to cap the maximum FPS at 60 in order to alleviate the issue.
New World was originally supposed to launch in August 2020, but was understandably delayed a number of times. The latest postponement sees the launch date pushed back to August 31 in order to make substantial improvements. "We’ve been hard at work on compelling end-game features we believe are important to include at launch. These features won’t be ready for the Spring timeframe that we had communicated,” said the dev team.