Most of the "damage" that happens to a GPU is due to thermal expansion, which happens at to a more extreme degree if you're cold booting a game and then from a

Most of the "damage" that happens to a GPU is due to thermal expansion, which happens at to a more extreme degree if you're cold booting a game and then from a hot gaming state back down to cold. Where are with mining it's usually running constantly at a more or less stable temperature, thus it experiences much less of stress from the thermal expansion side of things.