No it’s not likely that New World is bricking GPU’s

Despite the reports, headlines and misguided comments claiming New World is bricking GPU’s this perspective has little basis in fact. The reality is few people (GPU manufacturers and Amazon) can definitively say “yes it is” or “no it isn’t”. Whilst some cards have certainly failed whilst playing New World I think this is a correlation, not causation. At the moment, on one hand, we have between tens and hundreds of anecdotal claims that cards have failed whilst playing, on the other hand, no GPU manufacturers have directly blamed New World or advised against playing it which says a lot. Whilst these claims may be a signal that there is an issue it is insufficient to definitively say New World is the cause. Let’s explore this a little:

1. GPU manufacturers have not directly claimed that New World is cooking their cards says a hell of a lot as they are the people who stand to lose the most from a game cooking a card and as such they’d be warning us, they’re the ones who will be receiving all of the failed cards for investigation so can identify which models and batches are affected better than anyone AND they’re most likely to have the stock to investigate. They also would be the first to see an influx of RMA’s with new cards. As such they are the most reliable source and the best signal to look out for to confirm or deny if there is a problem.
2. Amazon has denied the claims that the game is killing graphics cards however as they may receive a report that their game killed a card but not the cards themselves for investigation it’s difficult for them to definitively claim this or test this and even testing a large subset of cards on the market may not be sufficient to identify an issue. They are less likely to get as complete of a picture as GPU manufacturers. Some users will report the issue to Amazon, others would not. GPU manufacturers however will be made aware of most cards within warranty period.
3. YouTubers and tech news outlets have the most to gain – “New World is killing GPU’s” is a nice juicy headline. Honestly some of the alarmist attitudes and clickbait headlines have been quite irresponsible, by all means it’s fine to recommend precautionary measures however we also need to consider that if it is a fault with the cards then we might be masking the issue and delaying failure of some cards till they’re out of warranty which is just as bad.
4. The quantity of reports vs player base was miniscule with various graphics cards reported. Day one New World saw over 800,000 concurrent players, today (18/10/2021) it saw a peak of 609,137 concurrent players, if it was actively killing graphics cards we’d be seeing many many more reports given that with that many concurrent players the player base is likely many million, the amount of genuine failure reports however is likely in the hundreds. Even if say 3,000,000 people play the game (low-ball estimate – I’ve seen reports as high as 10,000,000) if there were 1,000 reports (realistically there’s probably only a few hundred at most) that would only be a 0.033% overall failure rate whilst playing New World. The influx in players on such a popular new game is likely to also cause more play time and hence more failures in a shorter period due to more total hours accrued by the player base.
5. Hardware tends to fail more often in the first year than the second (as critical manufacturing defects or physical damage from transit/installation often present themselves during this period) which is one reason why we can expect to see more 3000 series cards in reports than other cards with a similar number in the wild.
6. Kudos to EVGA as they’ve owned a manufacturing fault/design issue which impacted a small subset of their 3090’s which was the most prominent group of faulting cards in the beta which has likely contributed to the hype around cards failing when playing New World certain YouTubers have also been a tad alarmist which has further hyped this issue out of proportion.
7. All hardware has a normal failure rate, it’s inevitable that a small percentage of cards will fail when strained, besides issues which have been identified by manufacturers we have no reason to assume that these failures are related to the game.
8. Some outlets have noted that Gigabyte cards have been mentioned fairly frequently, with that being said it’s really difficult to get a good picture, they may simply have a large amount of cards in the wild or there could be a manufacturing issue, honestly we cannot determine this with such a small sample of reports.
9. You’ll notice that many posts on this topic on other sites will claim or imply New World is Killing cards but fail to state that outright in their articles. So either they do not fully believe their own claim or they cannot adequately substantiate it and as such it should not be accepted as fact. You’ll note I do not definitively state either way as I do not and cannot definitively state that cards are or are not being killed by the game at this time and neither can other outlets, the entire point of this article is to say we don’t know, and inform readers as to who we can and should listen to and why (when they finally make a statement).
10. Personally I run a MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio in a well ventilated case and have played for 80+ hours, I enabled data logging in GPU-Z for some time at both 1080p and 4k and DID NOT see excessive temperatures, any odd fan behavior, or my card exceed it’s given power limit, or for that matter any other behaviour which might indicate a problem.

At this point, I don’t think there is a huge reason for concern as if graphics card manufacturers had seen a massive influx of RMA’s they’d issue a warning which they have not. Taking precautions is premature as if it is a fault with specific models of cards that may delay failure and if you’re coming up on the end of warranty that may not be ideal. The best thing to do is keep an eye out for a statement from your card’s manufacturer and follow their advice.