A new thread on Reddit revives concerns that playing New World may be resulting in damage to some high-end graphics cards. There were reports of 3090 cards dying after playing this summer's beta of the MMORPG, but most of those were eventually blamed on a specific problem with EVGA cards. PC Gamer digs into these reports, saying that while they seem credible, it has been unable to recreate the results:

In our testing Alan has noticed that when changing the graphics settings the game does go through a hard refresh, where the engine seems to want to draw the whole scene again, from low poly models, adding more and more detail from there. That seems to put a lot of strain on your system, often hitting 100% GPU load just from switching around some graphics options.

It does bear saying that we've not seen a card fall over in our experience yet, and a lot of people on the team have been playing New World out of morbid curiosity. There's also the fact that even under 100% load your GPU should be able to cope, which again speaks to potentially already existing, underlying factors in the manufacturing of the graphics cards that have actually bricked as a result of running the game.