UPDATE: In a statement posted to the @playnewworld Twitter feed, the developers said the game "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."
Still, the developer said it would roll out a patch on Wednesday "that caps frames per second on our menu screen" to "further reassure customers."
Original Story 7/21:If finding a graphics card wasn't hard enough already, now it seems you need to be careful which games are played once you have one. Amazon's massively multiplayer online (MMO) game New World is bricking GeForce RTX 3090 cards, according to reports.
As VGC reports, the graphics cards are being "fried" when playing a closed beta version of the upcoming MMO. A thread on the New World subreddit lists a growing number of permanently broken graphics cards due to the high temperatures being generated.
The overwhelming majority of these cards are manufactured by EVGA, but it only seems to be happening when playing this New World beta. Comments on another Reddit thread suggest this may be an EVGA problem, but someone with a Gigabyte card stated it had also been bricked, so the jury is still out on this.
Twitch streamer Gladd suffered this problem while playing the game with an EVGA 3090; he tweeted a warning and posted a video on Twitch. A post on the New World forum by user Goatz explains what happened with a EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra card:
"So after hitting the play button for New World beta the game started to load, followed immediately by fan speeds increasing to 100%, fps dropping to 0, and then my monitors turning off and my video card is no longer detected. So i reboot the PC and everything seemed to work fine, i even tried a few other games to make sure and i had no problems. So i hit play on New World again and same thing happen but this time i heard a loud pop and now my 3090 wont get past POST on bootup."
Replies to the post are mostly users suffering the same experience and being left with a dead graphics card. The advice is therefore to not play the game if you are using an RTX 3090, and especially if it's an EVGA card, until the cause is discovered and a fix released. That fix may be for the game, for RTX cards, or both.
However great your desire to play New World is right now, it can't outweigh potentially destroying a $1,500 graphics card, especially if you camped out to get it.