EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Cards Will Get New BIOS After Amazon 'New World' Debacle

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 07 August 2021, 04:08 pm

EVGA is doing everything it can for their NVIDIA RTX 3090 FTW3 cards, especially after the debacle with Amazon's "New World" MMO, killing a few.

VideoCardz reports that the company will be offering a much-needed firmware update for their RTX 3090s, which is rumored to fix the problem with the graphics cards' fan RPM sensors.

It's these RPM fan sensors that had led to many EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 cards dying when they played the "New World" MMO's beta because apparently, the game's unlocked frame rate tricked the cards into making the fans spin way faster than they're supposed to. As a result, the cards' cooling mechanisms broke, overheated, and eventually died.

Furthermore, it's not even just EVGA's RTX 3090s that were being affected, it seems. Other NVIDIA GPUs like the RTX 3080 Ti and RX 6800 XT/6900 XTs from AMD have also had problems with the new MMO game from Amazon.

This comes after EVGA vowed they will replace all NVIDIA RTX 3090s that died while playing "New World" over two weeks ago, reports Tom's Hardware.

EVGA RTX 3090 Problems With 'New World': What Happened?

As previously stated, the EVGA RTX 3090s that died playing the Amazon MMO appeared to have been bricked due to the game's very high frame rates. However, many other video games also have sky-high frame rates, and they haven't had the same issue.

To find out what really happened, popular tech YouTuber JayzTwoCents put "New World" and its NVIDIA RTX 3090-killing capabilities to the test recently. Initially, the theory involved the game's so-called "runaway" frame rates in the main menu. But runaway frame rates (those reaching up to thousands of FPS in menus, for instance) are not uncommon in video games at all.

At the end of the test with the same problematic EVGA graphics card, most parameters like VRM temperatures stayed normal. But the problematic one was the card's peak power draw while playing the game. The EVGA RTX 3090 drew an average of 10% more power than its max power limit, which made the card run way hotter than it's supposed to.

This could be among the reasons why many GPUs of this model got bricked, but it's not really tied to the fans spinning too fast at all.

There are more details about the tests in the video:

An Isolated Incident, More Or Less

The developers of "New World" have since patched the game. According to Tom's Hardware, the fix capped the runaway frame rate in the menu screen to prevent the game from "over utilizing" the graphics card. However, the devs didn't even know what caused the deaths of those 3090s. These problems, they say, weren't even present during their earliest playtests, when the game is supposed to be more unstable and incomplete.

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Written by RJ Pierce