New World killing off Nvidia GPUs: how technology failures continue

New World gamers face problems with burning graphics cards

Amazon's New World Beta and Alpha gamers across the globe face a similar problem as they are reporting that their graphic cards are dying after just 15 to 30 minutes of playing the game. As of right now, the issue is related only to GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards which tend to overheat and see power spikes. In particular, EVGA-branded 3090s were crashing and even suffering catastrophic failures upon the game's launch^[1].

Developers of the game recommend not to play it until a fix-up patch is implemented that will cap frames per second. In a statement, Amazon said:

“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”.

Generally speaking, graphics cards are a critical component of any computer used for gaming, and a card failure can make the device unusable. Graphics cards can fail in several different ways, often due to system incompatibility, however, usually, there are warning signs like screen glitch, stuttering, or even louder than normal fan noise^[2].

According to the tech report,^[3] the issue which was killing off the cards was related to the bug within EVGA's fan controller and could not be related to New World only. Upon testing, it turned out one of the fans could be spinning as fast as 200,000 RPM, resulting in a fatal hardware crash.

EVGA replaced all the broken GPUs free of charge and is likely to issue a fix that would limit the fan speeds, preventing the cards from going haywire.

Innovations aren't as good as expected and that's a letdown

We live in a very digital world nowadays. Mobile phones or laptops are the norms, and smart devices have become more and more common for the majority of people. However, with a significant rise in demand for such devices and obvious technological development, questions for an important discussion arise.

Does modern technology live up to the hype? Sadly, the answer more usually is a no as it seems that companies just can't make something with high quality and technological advancement while at the same time keeping the element of novelty and innovative approach alive.

Whenever we hear about new computer technology or program, we think about all the cool updates, however, more often than not, the new product comes with tons of bugs, flaws, crashes, and even security problems. Some researchers tend to believe that new technology causes more problems than it solves, and on certain occasions, it doesn't really work well with other programs or devices^[4].

Basically, sometimes we should stick to good old trusted software, computer or device as certain innovations seem to kill each other and in the end, none of them end up doing its' job. After countless updates, we saw major flaws tied to such apps as Facebook or Messenger, as well as 2018 CPU hardware vulnerabilities that affected all computers that were on the market at the time^[5].

As new technologies fail to play nice with each other, we see some interesting patterns like graphic cards overheating and becoming unfit for the devices or simply new updates totally crashing processors. It seems that new technology just cannot get it right.

Innovative choices put Mac into hot waters

The aim to better user experiences and make technological improvement could lead to huge fail. In 2019 Mac faced controversy surrounding CPU thermal throttling in newly released MacBooks. Both 2018 and 2019 MacBooks Pro models showed severe throttling issues as well as a lowered voltage which apparently was fault from the manufacturers^[6].

Thermal throttling is connected to electricity usage. However, in certain situation CPU uses enough electricity and everything heats up. It's dangerous for CPU as extreme temperature could damage it and it could even combust. Seeing this fail, right now Mac is trying to adapt much more fitted cooling system. Whether that will work with newer versions of Mac, that's a question that still remains unanswered and that seems to be a pattern with many new technological updates.