Update 4:16 p.m. ET: Amazon has responded.

If you are fortunate enough to own an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, the most powerful and expensive of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30 series, you may want to stay away from Amazon's New World MMO.

Many Reddit users (all GeForce RTX 3090 owners) have reported that the recently launched New World closed beta not only crashes on their graphics cards, but also completely bricks their $1,499 components.

Users on the official New World forums have also reported the same problem: their GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs have completely burned out after only a short time playing the beta, as has Twitch streamer Gladd, who has over 438,000 followers, tweeted that his card suffered the same fate.

Amazon issued a response on New World's support forum, stating that the issue is most likely related to the driver settings and frame rate limiter. It also stated to disable the override in the driver settings and offered other steps gamers can take.

Most complaints seem to be related to the GeForce RTX 3090 versions made by EVGA, specifically the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra. At this stage, however, it is not clear exactly what is causing these catastrophic failures. It could be a manufacturing defect in the card, or in New World itself, or a potential firmware issue. Some affected users have removed the bricked GPU and replaced it with a completely different graphics card, and have been able to run the beta without further problems.

Whatever the root cause, our advice to GeForce RTX 3090 owners, regardless of which model you own, is to avoid New World for now. Yes, it is a closed beta with a time limit, and from the number of visible complaints, it does not appear that all GeForce RTX 3090s are suffering.

However, given that this graphics card is very expensive and hard to find in stock, the latter is almost as good as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and does not seem worth the risk at all. Some users might be able to get a replacement under warranty, but wouldn't it be better to avoid breaking a top-of-the-line graphics card in the first place?