Amazon's New World beta seems to be going well. The game recently passed 200,000 concurrent players on Steam, which is pretty good for a game that hasn't even been officially released yet.
But it’s not all smooth sailing for New World. Last week, reports surfaced that New World players were suffering catastrophic hardware failures while playing the beta, with one particular video card frequently bricking itself. The EVGA RTX 3090 is perhaps the best video card on the market, but despite having more than enough power to play New World at maximum settings, the game was somehow killing these beastly cards.
Amazon denied reports that its game was killing graphics cards, but the publisher released a patch that limited New World’s frame rate just in case.
Turns out, a runaway frame rate might not have been the issue at all. A new report from Igor’sLAB seems to have narrowed down the problem to EVGA’s fan controller, which just runs buck-wild during New World game sessions.
Igor'sLAB ran New World on an EVGA RTX 3090 with several hardware monitoring programs going to see what might pop out. As you can see from the screenshot, the GPU fan went from a cool and quiet 1600 RPM to north of 200,000 RPM, which must have caused quite the racket.
At that fast a speed, the fan is likely to burn itself out, which would then lead to the GPU operating without enough cooling. If the player didn't notice the fan had died and kept playing, it could lead to a catastrophic failure of the graphics card.
The funny thing here is that the issue wasn't limited to just New World. Igor'sLAB was able to replicate the same thing while playing Anno 1800, an older game that also shouldn't push the RTX 3090 to anywhere near its limit.
EVGA has already agreed to help players with bricked RTX 3090s and replace them free of charge. Hopefully, EVGA also releases an update to its fan controller to prevent future RTX 3090s from needing to be replaced.