Amazon’s foray into the world of online game development has hit an embarrassing early snag with reports that its newest title is frying expensive Nvidia graphics cards.
Beta testers of Amazon Games’ New World MMO using the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 – the top-end model of Nvidia’s RTX 30 series, which sells for upwards of $3000 in Australia – are reporting that the game is completely bricking their graphics cards, particularly those made by board partner EVGA such as the $3999 AUD FTW3 Ultra (below).
Users say that their cards are dying on menus and loading screens, sometimes with “a loud pop”, and New World’s FAQ page does warn that the game has been known to suddenly jump to 99 per cent of a card’s maximum power.
Here's a forum of the same thing happening to others.
— Gladd (@Gladd) July 21, 2021
A customer service post on the New World forums points the finger at “driver settings and frame rate limiters”, and suggests players cap their frame rates at 60 frames per second.
In a statement to IGN, Amazon denied any connection between New World and the nobbled graphics cards and stressed that the game is safe, saying that “hundreds of thousands of people” have played in the closed beta without issue so far; however, it has rolled out a patch that caps the frame rate on its menu screen in an attempt to alleviate the problem.
“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 statement said.
New World is slated to release on August 31.
