Back in July, we reported that Amazon Game Studios’ upcoming New World MMO was killing EVGA RTX 3090 graphics cards. Not exactly the headline anyone with a $1500+ USD graphics card wants to hear about. The possibility of a mere video game killing a graphics card probably wouldn’t occur to most. It didn’t take long, though, for EVGA to verify the situation and offer a solution for troubled customers. While the reason for the failures at the time was not made clear to the public, EVGA shipped out replacements and collected the dead graphics cards.
Today, a company representative has put the pin in that story. EVGA reached out to PCWorld to explain that the RTX 3090 failures were linked to simple factory defects on early production models. The explanation from the article reads: “Under an X-ray analysis, they appear to have ‘poor workmanship’ on soldering around the card’s MOSFET circuits that powered the impacted cards.”
The original running assumption was that New World itself was forcing the graphics cards to run at uncapped framerates to the point of failure. However, Amazon quickly shot down the possibility of that being the case. Nevertheless, it quietly pushed out a patch to mitigate the framerate issues, specifically in the main menu where framerates soared into the 800fps ranges and reportedly as high as 1,000fps for some.
German media outlet Igor’s Lab also commented on the situation early on and suggested that faulty fan controllers were responsible for the failures. The site decided to monitor the hardware while running the game and noticed that the fans were attempting to reach speeds of 200,000rpms and ignoring limiters. While the fans weren’t actually coming anywhere close to actually running at those speeds, they were still under stress from maximum utilization.
Setting things straight
However, EVGA states that the issues with the RTX 3090s failing while running New World doesn’t relate to the fan controllers in any way. The soaring framerates simply caused computer hardware monitoring tools to incorrectly report. EVGA has since corrected that issue as well. Users can get the necessary micro-controller update via the EVGA Precision X1 GPU software tool.
With this matter formally resolved, Amazon can now focus on the upcoming release of New World. The game will compete with the likes of World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and many more heavy hitters in the genre. Performance aside, it will need to have a strong content strategy to catch the attention of MMO enthusiasts and keep them engaged.
