Age of Conan - The Quest for Lost Performance
The Way It's Meant To Be Played? "From Characters Only" shadows in action on ATI hardware. If you are seeking to beef up your system to run the game better, you need both CPU and GPU speed. If your CPU is fairly modern (2.4-2.8Ghz Dual Core), there isn't much to be gained there, so a faster video card is the obvious answer. Due to poor SLI/Crossfire scaling, GX2 and HD3870X2 do not offer benefits in Age of Conan, so single card solution is the cost-effective solution. As ATI has issues with the shadows and offers slightly poorer performance, at the moment, a GeForce 9800GTX 512MB or GeForce 8800GTS 512MB is the best choice when picking a card for Age of Conan. Older 8800-series (g80) cards reportedly have some odd performance issues as well, and as they are discontinued models, they are not really recommended upgrade anyway. Additionally, the 320MB 8800GTS is pretty much "no go" due to lack of texture memory as 512MB card is definitely needed for High resolution textures. In addition to the shadow bugs, ATI cards (HD38x0 series) seem to suffer from performance issues that slow down the game after multiple zonings on "High" settings. As the framerates are universally not quite as good as on the NVIDIA offering, right now the Green Team has the better card on offer for Age of Conan. Some of these issues may be driver-related, so if you are stuck with ATI hardware, best bet is to wait for new drivers. Buggy and Unfinished Sometimes the engine has major issues with texturing - issues like this. In summary, Age of Conan eats up gobbles of RAM, doesn't really multithread and is very much limited by your video card - at all settings. The only important configuration settings that affect your framerate are the Draw Distance and the Shadow mode you use - and disabling shadows doesn't seem to do it properly on ATI cards. In a way, most graphical settings of the game seem as fake as the landscape - you can crap your visuals, but it won't really touch your framerate, at least if your system is fairly modern. As you drop down the visuals, you are limited by the speed of a single core in your CPU. There is also the mystery of constant stuttering on some systems but not on others. My guess is that the game is hitting different bottlenecks - system RAM, video card memory bandwidth, shader performance and so on - on different setups at different presets. This means that on some systems, most tweaks available do just about nothing. Effectively you can max out most settings while the loss in performance is insignificant, as the bottleneck(s) holding you back are not related to the visual quality sliders. Either way, Age of Conan is demanding, and while it looks fairly good, there are some serious issues with the code that runs things under the hood. We'll get to the long laundry list of gameplay issues in a separate review, coming soon.
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