Age of Conan - The Quest for Lost Performance
First Things First - Add More RAMWhen figuring out what is the bottleneck for Age of Conan, my first observation is that Age of Conan is the first game that effectively requires 4GB of RAM to run properly at high settings. Sure, you can play with 2GB, and it runs pretty well on XP with that, but on Vista, 2GB just doesn't cut it. There is far too much stuttering as the client has to swap bits and pieces out. The only system with Vista that I personally managed to get running without constant stuttering had Vista 64-bit with 4GB of RAM. Funcom has their work cut out to try and bring down the RAM consumption, and until they do, 4GB is very much recommended as Age of Conan can push the memory usage over 2.5GB on modern systems.  "Enchanced for Multi-Core", or maybe not. Also happily chomping over 2.5GB on Vista (Core 2 Quad Q9550, 4GB RAM) CPU also matters, but nowhere near as much and only once your videocard is in order. The game multithreads to a degree - dual core CPU is a good idea - but on quad core systems the load tends to concentrate on one core while the other three hover between 0 and 20%. You get better performance with a very fast dual core CPU than a slower quad core. When running on a quad core, biggest improvement comes from reduced load times as part of the "loading" involves some CPU-heavy decompression and/or precalculation, and a quad core CPU can cut this down considerably. The obvious remaining bottleneck is the video card - and here the performance is, for the lack of a better word, "unpredictable". SLI and Crossfire support is poor - while crossfire offers some minor framerate improvements, generally Age of Conan doesn't support multi-GPU properly at this time. Settings That Do Nothing For PerformanceWhen trying to find out how to optimize the framerate on systems which can't run the game fine on "High" I ran into frustrating issues - most of the sliders and adjustments don't seem to actually do anything to the framerate. The game gets uglier, yet runs just as poorly. This also means that running on a weaker system, the framerate is poor and no matter how much you degrade the game visually, it tends to stay poor. I started out with AMD Athlon64 FX-62 (2.8Ghz, Dual Core), 2GB RAM and HD3870X2. To avoid visual bugs caused by the dual chip mode, I set the Catalyst A.I. to disabled (turning off one of the GPUs). When running at 1600x1200 with the "High" preset while standing in Old Tarantia gave me 20-22fps, which is barely playable. Medium bumped that to 30-34fps while Low gave me 40-45fps. I started tweaking things and soon found out that almost none of the sliders and switches actually do anything to the performance. I could happily change Texture Resolution from Low to High, and while some building textures improved, framerate didn't move at all. Shadow Resolution made the buggy character shadows sharper, but again the framerate stayed the same. I bumped the ground render quality up to high, and while the ground texture changed to be much more detailed, again framerate didn't move. After all these changes done to the default "Low" settings, the framerate was still around 40-45fps. Adding grass also just added grass - nothing changed in the performance department.
In fact, the only setting that seemed to do anything were the general draw distance. Low sets it to 70m, and while I could happily move it to 1000m without performance penalty, bumping it up to the "High" default of 2800m did cut down the framerate by about 10fps. Desperately trying to figure out what caused the halving of performance between "Low" and "High", I finally stumbled upon the shadow setting. "From Characters Only" gave 40fps (and buggy shadows floating separate from the characters), while both "Disabled" and "Everything" cut the framerate to below 25fps at 2800m draw distance. There is something rotten with the shadow system on ATI cards. End result was that with some tweaking, my system could run the game looking considerably better, yet taking only about 10% hit in framerate.
GeForce 9800GTX 512MB offered similar scaling (in other words, not much). The main difference was that the card managed to run the game approximately 10fps faster at all settings levels when compared to the HD3870. High settings actually ran at a playable 30-35fps, instead of 20-22fps that the ATI card managed to push. Again dropping down the settings gave similar effects with the exception of shadows - the "From Characters Only" shadows actually worked correctly on the NVIDIA hardware, and disabling shadows gave same performance as "From Characters Only", instead of the lower framerate exhibited on ATI hardware. I then moved to a modern quad core system - Core 2 Quad Q9550, 4GB RAM and GeForce 9800GTX 512MB running 64-bit Vista - and ran the same tests. The added RAM cut down some of the stuttering, but didn't eliminate it completely. Faster CPU helped to cut down loading times considerably, but on the framerate department the FX-62s 30-35fps at high turned to 35-40fps, and once again turning the game to super ugly mode increased the framerate only to about 50fps - about 5fps improvement from the FX-62, most likely due to the higher single core performance. Shader Model 2.0 - The Last Hope SM2.0 in action at maximum settings. There's one more setting that actually improves performance, but at a great visual cost - the "Shader Model" setting. The game defaults to SM3.0, and both SM2.x and SM2.0 modes run considerably faster. Dropping to SM2.0 improved the framerate on 9800GTX to 60-80fps range, but I disregarded it as the visual quality loss is too much for me. Dropping to SM2.0 disables grass and shadows, regardless of what those settings say, and overall makes the game look "flat".
Dropping to SM2.0 is a potential option for low and mid range systems, but you then lose all the visual glitz that sets Age of Conan apart from older games. Some people have also reported that the setting doesn't seem to stick and the game randomly resets it to SM3.0. I couldn't reproduce this issue myself, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the reports were true, considering how buggy the engine is.
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