Amazon says New World won't brick your GPU, despite reports of hardware failure

In context: Amazon's New World MMO just launched a few days ago, and it has been met with a mixed reception from players. Users enjoy the crafting system, combat, and weapon progression but aren't as keen on the story or the lack of mounts. Or the fact that, in some cases, their GPUs are being bricked merely from playing the game.

Or so gamers claim. Back in July, some users who owned EVGA's high-end RTX 3090 GPU found that the card would reach such high loads and temperatures on the menu screen – sometimes before they've even had a chance to adjust the game's settings – that their cards would outright die. Amazon later stated that the game had nothing to do with the hardware failures but nonetheless chose to institute an FPS cap on the main menu.

At the time, EVGA admitted that some RTX 3090s suffered from QA issues that could lead to catastrophic hardware failure under certain circumstances. The company swiftly sent replacement cards to affected customers – before even receiving the dead cards back at HQ.

Unfortunately, despite these early issues occurring three months ago, it seems New World's alleged correlation to bricked GPUs is still an ongoing problem. While not all players with New World-related hardware problems are experiencing card death – some just wind up with GPU crashes – there are certainly those that are. For example, one player's GPU allegedly began to smoke upon rebooting his machine after a system crash occurred during a New World session. PC hardware YouTuber JayzTwoCents explains the situation and even shows a clip of it happening live in the video above.

But don't just take our word for it. You'll find countless users discussing hardware problems, both minor and major, that they've encountered in-game over on New World's English Support forums. This thread, in particular, is an absolute goldmine for such reports. Even lower-end EVGA cards have been affected to some extent.

Amazon, for its part, still maintains that New World isn't the cause. In a statement to PC Gamer, the company claimed that there is "no unusual behavior" on the game's side that would be causing these issues and it has only received a "small number" of reports from affected players.

Perhaps that is true. Maybe New World is just putting a level of strain on already-flawed GPUs that they can't handle and don't typically face. Then again, maybe there is some strange component-destroying software bug in the game that hasn't been found yet.

Whether the fault lies with Amazon or GPU manufacturers, one thing is clear: there is a problem here and it needs to be solved sooner rather than later. No matter who is to blame, consumers shouldn't be left with dead or otherwise gimped hardware – especially top-end hardware – just for booting up a flashy new MMO.

We'll be reaching out to Amazon, as well as EVGA and other affected card makers for comment. We will update this article if we receive a response from any of them.