How to play Amazon New World with an RTX 3090 without bricking your GPU

While many gamers are enjoying Amazon's New World right now, people who have high-end rigs are being advised to avoid the title temporarily due to the fact that it's brutally bricking RTX 3090 GPUs and is also causing dangerous levels of overheating and power spikes on other elite graphics cards. Thankfully, there's a quick fix you can perform if you want to play New World without frying your pricey graphics card.

Here's what you need to do:

1. In New World, press the Escape key to open the Settings menu.
2. Click the Visuals tab.
3. Under Max FPS, cap the FPS at 60.

Players are reporting that capping the FPS is successfully preventing their graphics cards from overheating. It seems that the reason why New Worlds is putting GPUs at risk is because the menus don't have built-in FPS caps like other games do, causing elite graphics cards like the RTX 3090 to render the menus in 9000+ FPS and burn themselves out.

Hopefully Amazon and graphics card manufacturers are able to identify the issue and deploy a fix soon. If you're an owner of a top-tier GPU like the RTX 3090, we strongly advise waiting until the game's developers give a statement on this problem and confirm that it's fixed — especially since you'll have to spend a few seconds in the dreaded 9000+ FPS menus to change the FPS limit setting. If you really want to play New World before then, though, this quick fix will make the game much safer to run.

New World is available for $40 for preorder now, and is expected to fully launch on August 31 on Windows 10 (and Windows 11). Notably, preordering will give you access to the closed beta. Amazon is aiming to bring a high-quality MMORPG experience to PC gamers around the globe with New World, although whether or not the game has the depth to hang with the best PC games on the market remains to be seen.

Update July 21, 2021 at 5:25 p.m. ET: An Amazon Games spokesperson provided a statement to Windows Central, which includes mention of an incoming patch.

"Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played. We've received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World.

New World makes standard DirectX calls as provided by the Windows API. We have seen no indication of widespread issues with 3090s, either in the beta or during our many months of alpha testing.

The New World Closed Beta is safe to play. In order to further reassure players, we will implement a patch today that caps frames per second on our menu screen. We're grateful for the support New World is receiving from players around the world, and will keep listening to their feedback throughout Beta and beyond."