PSA: ‘New World’ Closed Beta could fry your RTX 3090


The closed beta for New World may be proving popular on Steam but it’s not been without issues. Some players are reporting that the game has fried their graphics cards.

In the New World forum, user Goatz posted that as soon as they tried to start the beta, their fan speeds increased to 100 per cent, before the frame rate plummeted to zero and the monitors turned off.

Upon rebooting their PC, they attempted to start New World again, after trying a few other games first.

“Same thing happen but this time i heard a loud pop and now my 3090 wont get past POST on bootup,” they wrote.

New World
New World. Credit: Amazon Game Studios, Double Helix Games

They added that this is actually the second 3090 FTW3 Ultra supplied by chip manufacturer EVGA to have failed while playing New World, having also experienced this during the Alpha.

Other users have replied to the post to confirm they have also suffered the same issue, including streamer Gladd who tweeted that “playing the New World beta on my EVGA 3090 has fried my graphics card completely.”

Users have also taken to Reddit to share their woes, where it appears that the issue is affecting 3090 GPUs from EVGA. According to Reddit poster SL1bu, it’s being caused by “memory overheating”.

“The memory spikes to over 100°C when running new world in any graphics setting with an uncapped framerate,” they wrote. “It is a somewhat publicly unknown issue with 3080 and 3090 cards… Most demanding games like Cyberpunk are ‘only’ in the area of 90°C with maxed out setting though, so it has certainly something to do with game optimization.”

The RTX 3090 GPUs are currently one of the most powerful GPUs on the market but their limited stock also makes an already expensive graphics chip even more costly.

NME has reached out to Amazon for comment.

Elsewhere, Konami has announced eFootball, a brand-new free-to-play digital-only football experience that’s set to replace PES for the immediate future.