New World breaking RTX 3090 GPUs

Vrika

There are multiple reports that RTX 3090 GPUs have been broken while playing New World beta. Most of the reports are about EVGA's RTX 3090 cards. It's as yet unknown whether the problem is specific to only EVGA's cards or if it affects also some other RTX 3090 models.

It's speculated that EVGA/NVidia allow the GPU to draw more power and generate more heat than it can handle, and on default settings New World has uncapped framerate on queue/menu screens that causes the cards to run at 100% utilization for prolonged times. This might create conditions where some RTX 3090 models break themselves trying to run too fast and too hot for too long time. However this is only speculation. There's no official word about the reason why the cards break yet. The problem could also be caused by something else.

People running on RTX 3090 GPUs, especially if it's EVGA's model, might want to avoid playing New World until the issue is solved because there are quite a lot of reports about EVGA RTX 3090 cards breaking down.

Source:
  https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/oobi56/did_the_new_world_beta_brick_your_gpu/

Tiller

Must be this guy's fault.

Quizzical

The lack of V-sync shouldn't break hardware.  Running video cards at 100%, as is common at sufficiently high settings that you can't match a monitor refresh rate, shouldn't break hardware.  Even an outright power virus shouldn't break hardware.  Or at least it shouldn't do it in a reasonable lifetime of the video card; it's acceptable if a consumer card breaks after 10000 hours of running it at 100%.

The video card turbo mode should be able to see what is happening and throttle back the card as needed to prevent damage.  If that's not happening, then either Nvidia's drivers are broken or EVGA's physical hardware design is defective.  Or both, or they're somehow incompatible.

Then again, to some degree, this is a case of them demonstrating why a 350 W GPU was a bad idea all along.  The traditional cap of 300 W on a board was there for a reason, and I think it should still be respected today.

Ridelynn

Yeah, software should never be able to break hardware. You would have thought Furmark and SC2 would have taught folks to do that, and the card has some thermal limiters already - obviously not enough.

I'm not exactly excusing bad code here - the fact that a loading screen can do that is an issue with efficiency if nothing else, but the hardware should be able to protect itself.

Rumor is this is happening with VSYNC and driver-based FPS cap enabled, so idk what the issue is.

That said, it didn't break my EVGA 3080, fortunately.

Hopefully they are able to get warranty work done on the broke cards - however long that may take.

Ungood

Humm maybe I will in fact wait a year after launch to touch this game.. let them work the bugs out.

Cacolaco

Amazon put a cap on the menu FPS to help with this, but given that it's one specific card that seems to be having issues, I'd put that more on the card manufacturer. Either way, Amazon still did something to help fix the issue, and EVGA should be responsible for some sort of a firmware update, if you ask me.

Vrika

Cacolaco said:

Amazon put a cap on the menu FPS to help with this, but given that it's one specific card that seems to be having issues, I'd put that more on the card manufacturer. Either way, Amazon still did something to help fix the issue, and EVGA should be responsible for some sort of a firmware update, if you ask me.

RTX 3090 cards were all new enough that they still had warranty, and EVGA has confirmed that they're replacing all the broken ones.

So no party has really confirmed what broke those cards, but Amazon has patched their game and EVGA seems to be replacing all the broken cards.