New World is the latest MMO on the block, and having the best possible experience is largely going to be down to how it performs on your system. The good news is that it should hit decent frame rates on reasonable, i.e. not cutting-edge, hardware.
Having canvased the team using a range of hardware setups, from GTX 1080 Tis to 3080s at 4K, smooth framerates are possible with some tweaking, although as ever the resolution you're running at is going to be the biggest factor affecting performance. If you can drop the resolution down, then it's a good idea. Note that there's no FSR or DLSS here, so if you do have to drop the resolution, it's not going to look great.
Performance ranges wildly depending on where you are and what you're doing. Running along the shoreline, despatching some of my old crewmates saw an average frame rate of 48fps at 4K on a GeForce RTX 2080 using the high settings. Chopping down trees outside a major settlement saw that drop down to 32fps, while running through the settlement averaged 24fps, with 99% lows down at a fairly hideous 6fps. And yes, those different areas are all recorded using the same settings.
This is fairly normal for an MMO, and you either have to put up with the odd drop in performance or switch settings as needed—World of Warcraft lets you have different graphical settings for raids, where there are lots more people, than when you're just exploring Azeroth on your lonesome.Even so, consistently smooth framerates, particularly when in combat is welcome, and sacrificing some graphical fidelity so that you don't miss time a dodge or a hit is a good idea. Here are the settings that appear to have the biggest impact on performance.
The gaming presets are, as ever, a great place to start, although they are rather crude—in that the preset is applied to all the settings below it. Selecting the medium preset puts everything to medium, not a clever mix of lows, mediums, and highs to get the best possible performance.
Ideally, you'll be able to play using the Very High settings, but if you're down to a snail's pace in a major settlement, then try dropping to High and failing that, then Medium. Low doesn't look too great, and I'd recommend dropping the resolution before going there.
It's worth flicking on the Show FPS option in the lower half of the setting screen, as this will put a hard number to what you're seeing. This only captures what you're seeing at a given time (if you want more details, install FrameView and use that instead), but it's better than nothing. You'll probably also want to turn off V-Sync and uncap the Max FPS (unless you've got an RTX 3090 of course). As for the main settings, the usual suspects are Texture Details, Shadow Details, and Lighting Details. These three tend to have the biggest impact on your framerates, so dropping these down on their own instead of knocking everything down with the presets is a good idea.
If you're running on high, but the framerates are dropping a bit low, try setting these three on Medium and see if that makes enough of a difference before hitting the Medium preset—which will set every setting to Medium.
Post Processing can also have an impact on your frame rates, but as ever, you're going to have to work out what's acceptable to you.You wouldn't think that the number of nameplates on the screen would have a massive impact on performance, but it can do—going from the default amount of 15 to up to 100 reduced my frame rate from 35fps down to 30fps, and that was in an area that wasn't too packed with names.
Reducing this to the minimum of 2 should ensure your screen isn't unnecessarily filled with nonsense and that your framerate remains high.If you're all about the graphical fidelity of the game then there's an option at the bottom of the visual settings screen that you're going to want to flick off, and that's Dynamic Resolution Scaling. By default, it's enabled and will drop the resolution to maintain a smooth frame rate.
There's another setting worth tinkering with as well—you'll find the option to turn off analytics reporting in the Preferences section, which can resolve latency issues.
New World runs pretty well when you're out in the open, and given that's where you'll be spending most of your time, you shouldn't have much of a problem getting the game running smoothly. Well, smoothly enough to kill 30 bores at least.