New World game reportedly bricking NVIDIA (and AMD?) GPUs

Strange reports are circulating on the web about GPUs getting bricked when playing the newly released closed beta version of Amazon's New World video game. Video cards getting killed by playing a regular game is something I've never heard before, but apparently, this MMORPG is causing quite a lot of havoc.

Is a bizarre bug turning video cards into paperweights?

Initially, reports seemed to come primarily from owners of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 video cards, but JayzTwoCents received reports that it's also happening with other video cards both from AMD and NVIDIA. Cards are reportedly overheating and hitting big power spikes.

I've now had the following GPU owners express they have had shut downs and failures with New World...
RX590
6800
6800XT
6900XT
3080Ti
3090
So once again, the issue definitely is with SOMETHING in the way the game New World is rendering. This ISNT a 3090'exclusive issue! PERIOD!!

— JayzTwoCents (@JayzTwoCents) July 22, 2021

There is some speculation that the bricking may occur due to very high GPU utilization in the game's menu screen. Amazon Games Studios claims New World is safe to play but is rolling out a patch to limit the menu screen's framerate to "further reassure players":

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.

Design issue with the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090?

A lot of reports of bricked GPUs seem to involve GeForce RTX 3090 cards from EVGA. German tech blogger Igor's Lab speculates the bricking could be related to design choices made by EVGA:

As I was able to find out, it is not an area of the voltage converter that is affected by the failure, but the “Fan Control IC”, i.e. the chip for the actual fan control, which is said to be completely burnt out in the worst case. We do remember that EVGA is also working with various additional temperature sensors on the board to better adjust the cooling, based on my research at the time. This is also evidenced by submissions from the aggrieved parties who reported extreme fan whine. -- Igor's Lab

Out of an abundance of caution, it's probably advised to stay clear of New Worlds until this matter is resolved.