Playing New World on a 1050 Ti

Photo credit: New World official website.

Over the past week hundreds of thousands of people have begun playing Amazon's new massively multiplayer online roleplaying game New World. As someone interested in the genre, I decided to give it a try myself. I won't dedicate much time in this article to reviewing the game other than to say that it's pretty good and is worth the $40 price. It reminds me somewhat of Valheim combined with Runescape mixed with an active combat system a la Dark Souls. It has a deep and satisfying gathering and crafting system that reminds me of the hours I wasted chopping Yew trees in Runescape back in 2003.

But on to the point of this article: performance. If you are like me then you don't have lots of money to spend on the hardware needed to play videogames on PC. Combined with the price gouging and shortages in the GPU market, it's difficult to get your hands on the latest and greatest in PC gaming. 

The Nvidia 1050 Ti is a low-mid range budget graphics card that released several years back that many of you likely have in your laptop. If not the 1050 Ti, you likely have an integrated chip approaching its performance (like Apple's M1), or something nearly equivalent like the 960/970m or 1650. This article is for you, as I had a difficult time finding any information on just how well New World plays on the 1050 Ti, which is what my laptop is equipped with. 

In brief, the 1050 Ti delivers an OK experience with respect to New World. I've found that with all of the settings turned to low and the resolution set to 1080p, I was getting around 45 frames-per-second in the open world and around 20-30 fps in crowded settlements. Generally the game was never unplayable except when there were internet lag spikes, which we can't really control and is more an Amazon server issue. 

Dropping the resolution down to 900p added about 5 frames per second, with 5 more added for 768p and 10 for 720p. I don't recommend dropping the resolution too low as the game becomes a blurry mess, especially with respect to the in-game text. 900p is doable but not optimal on larger screens. Hopefully Amazon adds a sharpening option or antialiasing, neither of which currently exist in New World's graphics options. 

My laptop doesn't have a great CPU, being a Pentium G4560, which is an older dual core processor that is thankfully hyperthreaded to perform more like a quad core processor. Those of you with newer AMD Ryzen or Intel Core CPUs will probably have a better experience than me in crowded areas. 

To sum up, would I recommend buying New World if you have an older machine with 1050 Ti-level performance? I'd say yes if you are OK with the limitations described above. Performance won't be perfect, and you'll have to be happy looking at kind of a blurry/choppy mess at times. However, none of the visual issues thus far have been enough to affect my enjoyment of the game, or have hindered me from completing quests and what not, and I'm sure that the performance will only get better with patches, as tends to be the case with PC games. 

That's all for now, see you in-game!