Amazon Patches New World to Solve "Dying RTX 3090" Dilemma

Marketing image for Amazon's new world MMORPG
(Image credit: Amazon)

According to a Tweet from Amazon's New World dev team, New World will be receiving a patch today that will cap FPS in the menu screen to prevent more RTX 3090's from dying due to "overutilization" of the GPU.

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This whole situation started yesterday when Amazon's new MMO, New World, went into its open beta phase, inviting more players to test the game. As new players began running the game, some users with RTX 3090's reported that their cards were dying from leaving the game running inside the menu screen.

As it turns out, the issue stemmed from the game's menu system not having a frame rate limiter, and allowing the GPUs to run at thousands upon thousands of frames per second. It's likely that the game was somehow "over-utilizing" the graphics card in a way that overloaded the VRM and power delivery system.

This new patch for New World will enforce a frame rate cap in the menu system that will reduce the graphics card's workload, which should help prevent further RTX 3090 deaths.

We still aren't completely aware of how the game can kill an RTX 3090 simply by running at thousands of frames per second. There are many other games that are capable of running at thousands of FPS in the menu without causing GPU damage at all.

It seems like the developers are puzzled too. "We have seen no indication of widespread issues with 3090's, either in the beta or during our many months of alpha testing," they wrote in their tweet addressing the hardware failures.

At least for now, New World's developers seem to have the situation under control with the new frame rate limiter, which they hope will prevent further RTX 3090 deaths.

Aaron Klotz
Freelance News Writer

Aaron Klotz is a freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering news topics related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.