Can bug in game kill hardware ???

[Brian John]

I have a question I hope you can help me with. While playing games, I sometimes encounter bugs such as objects clipping through each other, getting stuck, or stuttering caused by physics issues. My concern is whether such in-game software bugs could potentially damage or reduce the lifespan of a graphics card (GPU).

Thank you very much.

 

 

[Middcore]

No. 

[danalog]

The only case of a game ever damaging hardware directly was the New World MMO cooking some 30-series cards due to a sudden power spike the cards' power delivery circuitry could not handle. Nothing a graphics card processes and renders will harm it in any way - the only possibility of an application destroying a GPU is from aforementioned power issues. 

[GuiltySpark_]

38 minutes ago, Brian John said:

I sometimes encounter bugs such as objects clipping through each other, getting stuck, or stuttering caused by physics issues.

These are game bugs, they have no impact on your GPU's health. Welcome to PC gaming 

[xg32]

The bugs you are seeing is unlikely to kill a gpu

 

if a game can kill a very small portion of cards then it's on the design of the cards (new world, or more recently bf6 burning 5090s)

 

 

[GuiltySpark_]

5 minutes ago, xg32 said:

if a game can kill a very small portion of cards then it's on the design of the cards (new world, or more recently bf6 burning 5090s)

Can't speak to BF6 but the New World situation was quite literally shoddy soldering on a subset of EVGA's 3090's. The game just happened to put a super high load on the card which any card should have been able to take had there not been physical defects. Entirely on the manufacturer of the cards. My 3090 at the time survived New World beta and launch unscathed. 

[thrasher_565]

back in the day fur mark killed gpu. you can indeed do damage if you ran heave non stop. 

[manikyath]

just keeping the scope to 'gameplay or graphics bugs' aka stuff you see on screen; no, not at all.

 

there's some specific exceptions to that rule that i wouldnt really call 'game bugs': for example the report a while back where an MMO would cause huge power spikes.. that's something with more deeply rooted problems:

- the gpu firmware shouldnt have allowed that

- the driver shouldnt have allowed that.

[manikyath]

37 minutes ago, thrasher_565 said:

back in the day fur mark killed gpu. you can indeed do damage if you ran heave non stop. 

furmark is designed to run a gpu as hot as possible, and 'back in the day' thermal protections were just not really there.

[thrasher_565]

15 minutes ago, manikyath said:

furmark is designed to run a gpu as hot as possible, and 'back in the day' thermal protections were just not really there.

ya or vrm cooling

rember the nzxt aio cooler just had a 120mm fan blowing at the vrms...good old hybrid cooling...miss thow day...nop

 

[Kisai]

The solid answer to this is "No" unless the hardware is already failing or sketchy.

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/amazon-new-world-killing-rtx-3090-gpus/

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/starcraft-2-fries-your-gpu.47406/

 

Basically the chances of encountering something like this outside of a beta/alpha game is nearly zero.

What you'll notice in both of these stories is that it involves having the GPU maxed out by having the FPS uncapped. Which you should not be doing. Always cap the GPU at the frame rate of the monitor.

 

Even when this happens, it tends to be "factory overclocked" cards that exhibit this behavior when a far newer game pushes the GPU over the edge. As an example of this, basically every time FFXIV receives a content update patch, there is always people on the FFXIV forum who complain about damaged GPU's or "poor optimization" (code for "I want to run the game on a potato") FFXIV has been around since 2010, and that first GPU update was 2015, so obviously people who were barely meeting the specs in 2015 would have had a disappointing experience with the DX10 update, cue last years content update and this happened again.

 

Some manufacturers (cough *MSI*) have a history of cheating benchmarks and poor build quality that there is a small chance of a GPU+Driver+OS+Game combination that can damage a GPU by somehow getting it into a tight spinwait situation where the thermal management fails. This is what furmark effectively does.

 

I would not worry about it unless you've bought high end hardware and have gone out of your way to overclock it, as I would probably not recommend OC'ing anything with current generation hardware.