New World, a new video game from Amazon, has been causing quite a stir in the gaming community. Reports of the game breaking ultra high-end graphics cards, including the RTX 3090, have left many gamers wondering how this could happen. Running a badly coded game or any game for that matter can result in freezes or crashes, but permanently wrecking a card is a completely different story.
At the time of writing, the cause of the issue hasn’t been completely nailed down, but it appears to be with how the graphics card monitors its own hardware. Users have been seeing incredibly high FPS spikes into the thousands in the game’s menu screen, making the card’s fan controllers think that the card needs to be aggressively cooled. Apparently, the chip that controls this behavior is faulty and tries to spin the fans up to over 200,000 rpm, which is around 100 times faster than a normal range. When this happens, the card draws tons of power for those fans, resulting in it catastrophically failing and turning into an expensive paperweight.
Although the problem was first reported when the game was at its main menu, shorter fan spikes can also occur during normal gameplay due to the bad part on the card. Amazon has said that one way to avoid this is to cap the game’s frame rate in the in-game settings and ensure that there are no overrides in your driver settings. Amazon has even released a patch that is supposed to limit the menu FPS specifically. Another solution that seems to be working is to set the card’s power limit to around 50 to 60 percent so it won’t draw so much that it’ll fail. EVGA, for its part, is replacing any of its 3090s that have failed while running New World.
Now, let’s tackle a more general question. Suppose that you have a system that doesn’t have glaring hardware defects like the one we just discussed. Can you still break it just by playing a game or running a certain program? The short answer is technically yes, but it’s very, very unlikely. One way it could happen is if a program started messing around in your UEFI, your system’s firmware, in other words. Your PC needs that firmware to boot up and control critical settings. Having it corrupted could be like taking the starter out of your car if your motherboard doesn’t have some kind of backup. Fortunately, it’s very rare that a program would go rooting around in your UEFI, and modern UEFIs typically have strong security built-in that’s hard for programs to bypass.
But let’s say that you have malware that’s actively trying to harm your PC. There are ways that malware can physically damage your hardware, such as through a row hammer exploit for RAM, which accesses a specific row of memory over and over again to the point of permanently screwing up your modules. Another way this can happen is through a power virus, which pushes your CPU to its limit, kind of like a malicious version of Prime95, which some manufacturers call a power virus. This can damage your CPU if it doesn’t limit its power usage correctly. The good news is that modern hardware has fail-safes to prevent against some types of attacks like these. Regardless, malware like this is quite rare in the wild.
This business with New World was a thankfully rare example of uncommon circumstances coming together to break expensive components. The good news is that modern hardware has fail-safes to prevent against some types of attacks like these. Regardless, malware like this is quite rare in the wild. So, while it’s important to be aware of potential risks, there’s no need to panic. Just be cautious, and if your gear is out of warranty, think twice about early access titles, just in case.
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In conclusion, breaking a computer by playing a game or running a certain program is quite rare, but it can happen. The New World example shows that even high-end hardware can be vulnerable to poorly coded software. So, if you’re a gamer, keep updated with the latest patches and fixes, and always be cautious when running new software.