Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Performance Guide

By: Sarju Shah - Posted on Friday, June 20, 2008

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Funcom's new massively multiplayer online role-playing game, lets players develop their characters and explore the mythical world of Hyboria. The game offers excellent graphics but also comes with equally breathtaking PC system requirements. Much of the game runs without a hitch, but like many MMORPGs, the true test of the hardware is in the large cities. High population counts, towering spires, long view distances, and tremendous amounts of shadowing all combine to make game frame rates about as viscous as corn syrup. Weaker computers will grind to a stop, while more powerful machines will limp along at less than half or even a third of their usual performance when faced with these large city environments. There isn't much you can do to avoid the frame rate hit, but you can upgrade a few key components to make the game a bit more playable.

Server conditions, population activity, and numerous other conditions make testing MMORPGs difficult. We increased our usual test duration to three minutes and used FRAPs to measure frame rates to compensate for the variability of our test runs. Our test ran through the streets of Old Terantia where we wound our way from the East Gate to the docks and back. The path has a mix of long view distances, heavily trafficked areas, and graphically varied regions that make the test brutal on the system hardware, as well as representative of the different scenery that the game offers. We found that the city test represents the absolute worst case scenario. We easily saw our frame rates double as soon as we stepped outside of cities, and combat instances in enclosed areas proved much less taxing than the civil environments.

Game Settings
Age of Conan has lots of adjustable settings and sliders, but most of them don't affect performance. However, there are a few settings you can tweak to easily double performance.

Graphics
The game's minimum system requirements starts with a GeForce 6600 video card, but we'd be surprised if you could do any more than look at the title screen with such an old card. We went through almost 20 video cards to identify the video cards that give you the most bang for your buck.

CPU
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Toss your single-core processor in the dust bin of obsolete technology. Age of Conan practically requires a dual-core processor to run at all. We tested various speed quad-core, dual-core, and single-core CPUs from both Intel and AMD to help you decide where to devote your CPU budget.

Memory
Age of Conan requires 1GB of RAM to run, but that's barely enough to get the computer to boot in Windows Vista. We went ahead and tested the game with 2GB and 3GB of RAM to see what more reasonable amounts of system memory can do for performance.

Systems

A machine that featured the minimum system requirements--3GHz Pentium 4 processor, GeForce 6600 128MB video card, and 1GB of system memory--seemed reasonable, but we decided to build a test machine to see how the game performed on a system with the minimum required specifications. We didn't have many of the older parts, but we got close. We had to bump up the processor to a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and blew the dust off an old GeForce 6800. Even with slightly more powerful components, the game could barely run. We got the game to move at a semifluid pace in city environments with rock bottom settings, but playing on the min-spec system wasn't an enjoyable experience.

The game runs much better on a PC with the recommended 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB, and 2GB DDR2 memory system components. The recommended hardware let us crank the detail up to medium settings and even bump the resolution to 1600x1200 while maintaining very playable frame rates. The game played buttery smooth outside of the city areas.

Our self-proclaimed awesome system, a 3GHz Core 2 Quad with a GeForce 9800 GTX and 2GB of DDR2 RAM, ran the game without a hitch. We turned the settings up to high to experience Hyboria in all of its splendor.

System Setup:

Awesome System: Intel Core2 QX9650, eVGA 780i, 2GB Corsair XMS Memory (1GBx2), 750GB Seagate 7200.11 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows Vista 32-bit SP1. Graphics Card: GeForce 9800 GTX, beta Nvidia ForceWare 175.16.

Recommended System: Intel Core2 Duo E6600, eVGA 780i, 2GB Corsair XMS Memory (1GBx2), 750GB Seagate 7200.11 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows Vista 32-bit SP1. Graphics Card: GeForce 7900 GTX, beta Nvidia ForceWare 175.16.

Minimum System: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz, Asus P4C800, 1GB Corsair XMS Memory (512MBx2), Seagate 160GB 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2. Graphics Card: GeForce 6800, beta Nvidia Forceware 175.16.