AMD's much-vaunted new Crimson drivers are having an unexpected effect: that of damaging the cards they're meant to optimise.

The drivers — replacing the aging Catalyst software — reportedly set video card fans to a fixed 20 percent, regardless of GPU temperature.

As the cards heat up, the fans should increase in speed to compensate, but with the Crimson drivers, they have reportedly remained static at 20 percent.

This has caused temperatures in some cards to rise to over 90° Celsius, causing glitches, crashes, and even permanent damage to the cards.

It's a similar effect to two separate incidents involving Nvidia drivers, in 2010 and 2013.

AMD says a fix will be published today.

In the meantime, some users have reported manually adjusting fan speeds functions as stopgap workaround.