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Amazon's New World closed beta client is allegedly killing some GPUs

Following the deployment of the latest New World closed beta, some players have reported catastrophic results for their GPUs.

Chris Jarrard

July 21, 2021 12:45 PM

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Update: 4:40 pm PT with a statement from Amazon Games

Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played. 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 New World Closed Beta is safe to play. In order to further reassure players, we will implement a patch today that caps frames per second on our menu screen. We’re grateful for the support New World is receiving from players around the world, and will keep listening to their feedback throughout Beta and beyond

The latest closed beta for Amazon’s upcoming MMO New World kicked off recently and there have been reports from players that some GPUs have been failing while the game client is running. While most of the reports have mentioned different variants of NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 being the victim, the issue appears to be happening on other cards as well.

The initial collection of reports about GPU failure with New World came from a Reddit thread started last night that has reached nearly one thousand replies. The anecdotes range from seeing total graphics card failures to crashes and concerning temperatures. 

There has been some speculation that the issues are arising from New World’s tendency to let menus and loading screens run at uncapped frame rates. In situations like this, the GPU is still presented with a load to compute, even if something like a loading screen has little to no 3D data to process or render. This can result in insanely high frame rates (in the multi-thousands per second) capable of causing annoying coil whine or even hardware failure.

There have also been reported issues even for folks who are artificially capping the frame rates for New World, so pinpointing the exact cause of these issues is not exactly straightforward. We will keep an eye on the situation and keep you updated on any further developments.

Chris Jarrard

Contributing Tech Editor

Chris Jarrard likes playing games, crankin' tunes, and looking for fights on obscure online message boards. He understands that breakfast food is the only true food. Don't @ him.