Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

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ESRB: Blood and Gore,Intense Violence,Language - Mild,Nudity,Sexual Themes
Publisher: Funcom
Genre(s): MMORPG
Home Page: http://www.ageofconan.com/

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By: Jarno Kokko May 24, 2008

The Technological Side

...and that's why it's rated "M". Well, that and the boobies.

Full YouGamers performance analysis has to wait for the full review, but even now I can give some impressions and hints on the technical bits. The engine used to be a huge performance hog, and many rumors were floating around how it ran like a lame dog on this and that system configuration. These rumors were quite true as it ran like a dog on any system you could possibly buy and build until about two weeks before launch.

Thankfully Funcom actually fixed it, and while the requirements are fairly steep, it runs fine on most systems you can call gaming PCs. As usual, the minimum requirements (3Ghz P4, 1GB, GeForce 6600 128MB) should probably be taken as a feeble attempt at comedy, but you can expect the game to run very well on the listed recommended setup (Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 2GB, 512MB Shader Model 3.0 card - GeForce 7900GTX or better), and even if you don't quite match that, as long as you have 2GB RAM, the game scales down pretty well.

But I can't stress this enough - you need 2GB RAM. While playing the game can eat up to 1.2-1.4GB RAM with High textures, and even if you bump the settings down, too little ram will turn quick 1-2 second loading screens into altars of pain as the hard drive chomps away. 512MB of video ram is also needed if you want to be able to use the high resolution textures.

Beyond the hardware, there are also some things you can do to tweak the game a bit. First of all - make sure your drivers are up to date. People have complained about terrible performance, only to later admit they were running an older driver (or one of those modified Omega driver sets), and once they went and made sure all remains of the old drivers were taken out and the latest set of WHQL drivers (NVIDIA or ATI, depending on your card) installed, the performance got magically fixed. Age of Conan engine seems to be very picky with the drivers - probably some AoC-related driver bugs were fixed by the video card vendors only very recently.

And this is why Bloom is disabled by default. Needs some work.

If that doesn't do the trick, then there are plenty of options to tweak in the game. On some systems the game seems to default AA and AF to a fairly high default setting - 16x AF in my case. Toning that down a bit naturally helps. AA in particular seems to cause a massive performance hit with Age of Conan. You should also skip enabling Bloom - it's off by default, and has some issues. Then the next major performance hit is the shadows - Age of Conan has very detailed shadows from everything around you, and if the hardware is not up to it, they can slow things down quite a bit. A high end system can run the shadows at maximum setting at 30-40fps in most areas, so they work fine if you have a system similar to mine (a fast quad core, GeForce 9800GTX, 4GB RAM).

On the subject of quad cores and SLI/Crossfire, it appears that the rendering engine is unfortunately single-threaded, and a fast dual core gives you better results than a slower quad core. The game is also very much limited by your video card, unless you have a multi-GPU setup. Based on second hand information, SLI is properly supported, and based on personal testing, Crossfire also works and gives a substantial performance boost - albeit with some minor visual issues related to AFR - fog and some other visual effects exhibit flickering, and the item icons in your inventory flicker.