Amazon’s New World MMO stirred up a bit of controversy back in July when numerous beta testers accused the game of frying their expensive graphics cards. A large portion of the cards affected seemed to be GeForce RTX 3090 models from EVGA, and now, the company has explained why.
In a statement to PCWorld, EVGA blamed the failure of its GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards while running New World on a “rare soldering issue.” An X-ray analysis revealed that the affected cards had “poor workmanship” on soldering around the MOSFET circuits.
EVGA did not elaborate on how many GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards it has sold thus far but estimated that the problematic batch represents less than 1 percent of what’s been shipped. All of the failures reported to the company involved GeForce RTX 3090 models despite allegations that New World was bricking all sorts of GeForce cards, including AMD Radeon models.
Igor’s Lab published a story in late July suggesting that EVGA GeForce RTX graphics cards were failing due to a problem related to the fan controller. A company spokesperson has contested that theory, stating that there’s no truth to that.
“In no way shape or form, is it related to the fan controller,” he said.
The New World beta in question did not implement a frame rate limiter in the menu system, which many released games include. That could cause a GPU to suddenly go from an in-game frame rate of 100 fps to roaring along at 800 fps. It’s akin to driving a car at full throttle going up hill and accidentally putting the car into neutral. If you don’t lift your foot, the engine revs into its redline.
Source: PCWorld