f13.net

Anyone running this on a....lower-end PC? I'd really like to give this a shot, but well...my PC, gods bless her, is almost 6 years old now. I've sorta heard of people being able to run it alright if you crank the settings down. Just wondering how people here are faring.

Worst that happens is that I give the 360 version a shot.

My brother is playing on Pentium D 2.8ghz processor with an 8600GT and runs a solid 30FPS on low.
It still looks pretty great on low.


I'm running an E6750 Core2duo, 8800GT 512mb G92 (overclocked to 702mhz), 4Gb corsair dominator, and 2 256Gb harddrives in a striped raid array.
Runs 50-80FPS with everything maxed and 2x AA.

Don't even fucking try. Go away.

I'm running an AMD 64 3200, 2gb ram, 256mb 7800GT PCIe. I think it was about 2.5 years ago since I last upgraded. I hit the low quality settings and get about 20-25fps consistently. Haven't messed with any individual settings yet to see if I can squeeze out some more performance. I've been crashing all day today for some reason though.

Just found out that my desktop pc won't even run the intro.

But my laptop runs it just fine. The login screen does not lag at all.  :awesome_for_real:

Core 2 duo 6750, 8800gts 320mb, 4gig (3.4 available to xp pro), 1333mhz fsb. I went for medium settings and got 35-40, I turned on high textures and AA 2x and still the same 35-40 (and looked insanely better). I'm not sure what's going on, but it seems like you can turn up a lot here without really impacting performance.

I'm playing on a dual core AMD X2 3800, a 7600GT (256M) and only 1 gig of RAM.

Load times are horrible (that's also because I'm using an archaic 120gig IDE HD.. yeah yeah I should upgrade), but the game itself is fairly playable, 20-30 fps at the absolute minimum settings.

2 gigs of RAM is pretty much required if you want to avoid random stuttering / bursty graphic lag, imo.


-- Z.

So here's my spin on this business.

Pentium D 820 (2.8 GHz X 2), on Intel mobo
2 gigs pc5400 DDR2
GeForce 8600GTS
Win XP Pro
400 GB Maxtor HD 7200 RPM

I was running the game on 1680X1050 for my 42 levels with my DT. When I made my demo I decided to fiddle some more, and here's what I found out.

First thing I did was move my page file to a seperate HD, to optimize HD file access.

then, I looked over this post in the AOC forums - http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=13390

With a combo of heavy reading and following some tips from the pros, these are the specs I came up with -

http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/specs1.JPG
http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/specs2.JPG
http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/specs3.JPG

Now, I'm going to link some screenshots, and you'll see the FPS in the top left. They are very low, from 8 fps up to high teens. Given, this is in tortage, so silky smooth isn't absolutely necessary. And the main point is that even though the FPS is slow, it's smooth. There are occasional hitches, and the loading takes longer, but overall it stays very steady. and it looks gorgeous.

Now I could certainly lower the settings if need be, but in dungeons I get a typically sustained 20+ FPS.

http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/screen1.png
http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/screen2.png
http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/screen3.png
http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/screen4.png
http://www.dbsoundworks.com/aoclol/screen5.png

AoC seems to have very odd ways of rendering things, in that some detail settings don't seem to impact performance and some even seem to improve performance, such as render distance.

It seems that if you increase draw distance, you get more hitching immediately following the load, and a longer load as well, but moving around seems smoother. The number one thing I'd recommend to people having major performance issues, is reducing resolution. I have had better FPS than when I was at 1680X1050, and virtually bottomed-out settings.

Your System memory texture cache size is set to zero (a stupid default setting). Bring it up to max and I'm betting you'll see a decent increase in FPS.

One of my roomates has this running on my old PC, which is:

-1.5Gb of ram
-P4 3.2 Ghz with HyperThreading
-X850 AGP, not sure if it's 128 or 256
-The fucking shitty shitty HD that comes out of the PS3

And it runs smooth as hell.

I can't get it to run properly on any setting on a 3.2 Ghz E6800 with 4 GB of RAM and a 7800GTX. It works okayish on occasion (30-40 FPS), but it's nowhere smooth as a general rule.

Pentium D 3Ghz (dual core)
2 gigs ram
8800GT 625Mhz 512MB

Runs worse than Crysis on settings that are a notch below "fucking ugly".  Character models still look good (IMO), but everything else looks terrible. 

50+ FPS in indoor instances, which is just fine.  20-40 in outdoor (more in Tortage) with noticeable stuttering.  Sometimes I'll get a nice second or two of the game choking on its own vomit while it struggles to load something.  I can live with 20-40FPS but the stuttering and settings I have to invoke to make it so are not tolerable.

A lot of this seems to be luck of the draw.  People with better computers than mine are having much worse problems, while people with worse are having no issues at all. 

Exactly. I upgraded my computer 2 days ago and NOW I am having much worse performance. I am so happy.

Did that, reduced performance across the board. That setting is designed for laptops that have ram that is faster than their video card ram, specifically integrated video. You're basically bringing the ram speed to the lowest common denominator on any system with a non-integrated video solution. But given how AoC loves to randomize performance based on configuration, I'd imagine it helps on some configs.

I decided to let 4X AA go, since this game looks great even without AA, I've been getting stable 20-30+ FPS in all areas, indoor, outdoor, anything. It's a happy day.

It really pisses me off that I have a more up-to-date machine than some of you -- except for the bum, non-upgradeable vid card. And so I can't run it.

No, get it straight, it pisses you off that you were silly enough to buy a fucking mac after knowing for a decade that you can't upgrade dick.

It seems to have helped quite a few people, myself included, and my system isn't that much of a slouch. 8800gt w/512 ram, 4 gig DDR2 and a C2D 6750. I'm not saying you're wrong. In fact, a bit of research shows that your definition is quite accurate as to what system texture cache is commonly used for.

That said, this is funcom, and a visit to their boards will find posts with pages and pages argueing about this very issue, and it seems clear that somewhere somehow hardware isn't responding as expected, and a 'quick fix' is to allocate ram to handle a graphics cache, since for some reason or another, higher end video cards are getting clogged with textures. It seems reasonable, although I'm no expert, that allowing ram to take on some of the load might help out some systems.

I still like it.

I was about to get a new pc though... But the way everyone's talking the past couple of days, I think that I really am better off just waiting for the 360 version. People are having problems with roughly the same hardware I was looking into buying. Fuck this shit. I don't need to be more pissed than I already am.

Dead Man Walking.

Is it? Why? I thought Microsoft was giving them a lot of support for that. I haven't read anything else.

Hell, I'd go so far to say that if it wasn't for the planned 360 version, then they probably would have slimmed the requirements if it had been PC only. At least, I can't think of a better reason for why they did something so stupid.

What? You mean why they made it multiprocessor friendly and made it look like Hyboria? Yea, I can't see a reason either. It should've looked like WoW. I want 4 polygon arms. Fuck that.

Not sure what multiprocessing has done to aid this game to look like Hyboria. I don't see any good ai, physics, or complex animations here. In fact, it's pretty boneheaded on all of those fronts (it's an mmo though, so that's a given). It's just gpu intensive, not cpu intensive -- and not very well optimized with that even. Besides, if the cpu was so important, then some people here who are running smoothly with single core Pentium 4's wouldn't be.

I didn't say anything about wanting 4 polygon arms.

I do.

30+ FPS in Tortage.  1680x1050, Max settings, huge draw draw distance, 16xAnisotropic filtering, Bloom enabled, etc...

Just put this together this weekend, less than a grand at newegg, E8400, 4 gigs DDR2 800, 8800 GTS 512 MB, 7200 RPM drive, Vista.

I think the reason for the high requirements is more market differentiation than anything else. The 'M' rating, high graphic quality, and Xbox 360 distribution make it obvious that Funcom is trying to use the old baseball strategy of "hit 'em where they ain't" - in other words, do stuff that Blizzard isnt doing.

That being said, I have a hard time believing that the same company that turned out an MMO that is still a good 3-4 months and tens of thousands of man-hours away from being feature complete has the resources to finish the initial version of the game, finish the console version of the game (which hasn't been done before for an AAA MMO), and successfully integrate the two (which also hasn't been done before), by August.

If the Xbox version does release in August my guess is it would have Tortage and that would be it.

Can you give me some examples? Are the tits bouncing in your version of the game or something?

FFXI was a AAA MMO and it's been on 2 consoles with expansions and the PC.

The 360 version isn't due out in August. Anyone with that date hasn't noticed that it was pushed back until at least November. Though I doubt it'll drop until January or February.


Funny that you mention that - I noticed they do last night.

 :pedobear:

I guess my shitty gpu is preventing me from noticing such luxuries.

Physics isn't just ridged objects. It also applies to particle affects as well. I don't know why people say the animations are sub-par, they are really, REALLY well done, including some of the spell animations. Only reason i can think of is on lower settings they are getting depreciated. The AI is also very well done. Including the AI interacting with the environment, and how they interact in combat, once you get into higher levels this becomes more apparent, as its becomes less about the opponents level and more about how they act/react in combat.


Jorgen Tharaldsen on Age of Conan for XBox360(2:14) (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/191/view/videos/play/1228)

FFXI was a AAA MMO?  :drill: Ok I forgot about that one.

And yes the titties on my HoX bounce.

I get 30-40fps in Tortage on Medium at 1280x1024 w/ E6850, 2GB 2700 DDR, 8600GT, 7200rpm, XP. I think an 8800 is in my future.

schild walked me through setting my graphics setting in game to as he put it "find the sweetspot" for the 8800GT. DannyB helped with some additional adjustments.  Result was a better looking game and lower general FPS. but a smoother overall performance.  The gist of the tweaks seemed to be finding how much I could get my 8800GT to load before I encountered it and thus minimize the constant texture loading.

I can live with 18-25 FPS in hoggish zones like Khopesh and long as the stuttering is reduced to a minimum.  Tortage earlier today was a solid 35-40 FPS with only one hitch I saw the entire time.   

The biggest problems still seems to be NPCs that are obstructed by view and then pop in when you round a corner. 

Happy with the performance and look now, but I don't consider the amount of assistance I need to get here to be acceptable for any game.

I just noticed bouncing breasts when playing earlier today for the first time.  I am 99% sure that would have noticed that before today, had it been happening.

I also noticed getting higher level/more diverse loot dropping in the upper levels of Tortage last night/today, which leads me to believe that they either aren't talking about all the changes they are making with patches, or they don't have to patch to change loot tables (look up/server-side changes only, and they have some dynamic way of flushing cached loot tables - or they just let the ttl expire).  Game seems to be changing pretty steadily (I'm not saying that there isn't a ton that's borked, I'm just saying they do seem to be plugging away).  Course, I could have just been extremely unlucky with loot prior to that point.

Odd. My breasts are pretty much still stiff. Maybe because I didn't shove the slider to maximum boobage?

What about the aureole slider?

If an aureole is sliding, i'm walking away.

We must fight for the right of Aureoles to slide! This injustice must be stopped! Who is with me?

[size=5ptDear diary, today I made a predictable response on the internet[/size]

Just one slider for aureoles? Should be at least 6 and that's only if you are symmetry Nazi.

Mine are at the minimum and they have a bit of jiggle.

No idea when they started since I didn't think to look until someone in this thread put the idea in my head. :|

Do I have any chance at running it on my system? Or would I be better off waiting for the 360 version? I know my vidcard sucks and why I am afraid I won't be able to run this. It was a super cheap replacement for my old card that died. It unfortunatly has to last until I can build a whole new system in the far future, so no replacing it.

P.4 3.0
3 gigs RAM DDR1
AGP - ATI Radeon 2600 PRO 512MB version
7200 RPM hard drive
Running Vista

The vid card and vista may be your major holdups. And i say Vista, just because its going to eat a lot of the little power you do have before the game even runs. Your not going to get anything crazy fantastic with that rig however.

You'll probably be able to play it on low settings. The 3GB of RAM will help a lot.

It may run, and with heavy optimization (no AA/AF, distances turned down, shadows off, low quality textures, the standard stuff) might be playable, as Haemish said, the big RAM and VRAM will help a lot; It's a gamble, though.  If you know someone who's got the game, might have them install it and log in, just to test, see if it's playable.  Having a good framerate is semi-important, moreso than other MMOs, due to combat pace being way faster.

Despite the box, it only consumes ~26 gigs on my HD, at least when not running.  Not sure why they said 32GB; maybe it uses a LOT of temp space, or maybe that's the size it will be once they patch in the 40+ content.

--
Alkiera

Thanks for the replies. I may try it and see if it works. Want to try this game but don't want to wait for the 360 version.

On the 360 note, anyone know how they are going to handle the game size? Is anyone that does not have an elite going to be screwed due to HD size? If I want to play this I may have to see if I can get it to run on my rig since only have the 20 gig HD.

I have an overclocked 8800GT video card, but I also have an older PC: Pentium 4 (single core) 3.4ghz, with 3gb of RAM, running Vista. I also have an LCD monitor with a high native resolution (1680x1050). Here's the settings I've found make the game tolerable for me (~ 20fps) using this lowspec machine:

Resolution: 1680x1050
Full screen
Anti-alias: None
View distance: 1000m

Shader model: 3.0 (Shader 2.0 looks horrible and with a good video card I want to offload as much onto shaders anyway)
Shadows: Disabled
3D ambient occlusion: Disabled (<--- THIS IS IMPORTANT, with just this active I dropped to less than 10 fps.)
High quality view distance: 100%
Low quality view distance: Maxed
Particle view distance: 12m
NPC view distance: 250m
NPC high quality view distance: Maxed
Grass view distance: 80m
Ground quality view distance: 80m
System memory texture cache size: 0
Texture filtering: Anisotropic
Texture resolution: Low (might try with high though given video card)
Anisotropic filtering quality: 1
Enable parallax mapping: yes
Remove foilage around character: yes
Ground render quality: normal
Enable grass: no
Water reflection quality: None

Lum's settings work great for me.  The only difference is I maxed system memory texture cache and set texture resolution to high and it didn't seem to make any difference and helped the quality.  I'm consistently getting 30 -50 fps, depending on where I am, sometimes more.  It only buggers up for a few minutes when I change settings while playing.  I have an 8800 GT (the xfx one with the wee cute fan), 2 GB RAM, and a slower processor - also single core, running XP Home, 1280 X 1024 resolution.  So far these settings have worked the best for me. 

Well so far have a level 5 hox. Runs well but get some flickering of the background. But very playable.

Edit: Lum's setting work great for me, also I cranked up the cache size like Signe.

What is 3D ambient occlusion?

Wikipedia says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion) it's a technique for making 3d object look more real, by putting shadows in areas with lots of geometry, and not in relatively simple areas, simulating the lighting effects on an embossed piece of paper, for example.  The link has pretty pictures of bugs.

Neat technique, I have to admit.  Might be related to the 'flat' feeling people were describing in some other games.

--
Alkiera

I'm running the game very well right now, but there's one very noticeable problem.  Whenever I go into Nadini's house or Bartolomo's house and move towards Nadini/Raboz, I get what amounts to a complete graphical seizure for around 1-2 seconds.  This isn't just a hitch or stuttering, it's a complete graphical freeze/unfreeze.  Only seems to ever happen in very close quarters.  Funny enough, this does not occur in the bazaar area in Khemi.  Anyone know if changing a setting might help with this?

Tempted to try Lum's settings, but the one schild helped me come up with has done OK so far and it has LQ player shadows and water reflections on.  I loves me some pretty water.

I get the same problem in Nadini's shack.  I like to think it's her face and sweater that are causing the issues (so damn wrinkly!), but it may be that they are pre-loading the cut-scene everytime you enter the shack, whether it plays or not.

There are a lot of posts (and anecdotal evidence seems to verify) that if you click on "high" for your initial setting profile, then work down from there, you have much better results than if you click on "low" first, then work up.  It seems to do something behind the scenes that is not modifiable by the gui when you use the "low" "medium" and "high" profiles, and for some reason the "high" profile behinds the scenes settings just perform better.  YMMV.

The texture cache SHOULD be set to 0 on desktop machines, because it's designed for integrated video cards (like on laptops) with limited VRAM. Of course I imagine running AOC on such a laptop would be a theoretical exercise in any event. But I'd think it would actually be a performance slowdown on CPU-locked machines as it's moving more load from the video card to the PC.

Do you guys have any idea what can cause extremely long load time in AoC?

I was playing with a friend the other night, and typically a zone will take between 5 and 15 seconds to load for me, some times 20. My friend was having amazingly long load times even for tiny zones. On average around 45 seconds, and upward to a minute and a half.

Would this be RAM related, or maybe a HD issue?

Here is what I know, when you load a zone in conan, there are two loading bars, the top yellow bar, and the bottom red bar. For me, as soon as I start loading almost always the yellow bar is totally full instantly, and I just have to wait for the red bar. My friend said his top yellow bar starts going first, gets to about half way, and then the red bar starts moving, then the two slowly creep to full.

Any ideas?

I put water from ground on and it didn't affect performance at all with Lum's settings.  I also put the texture cache thingy back on and, with these settings, it didn't do anything to the performance, either.  That is confusing because last time it helped my fps.  Oh I don't know.  It works and it's not a slide show for now.  That's all I know.  I think I'll start just playing shooty games or something.  They seem angrier, like me today.

So......I'm still working with an ATI 9800 Pro.  Does my computer have a chance?  I haven't payed attention to the Graphic Card market for the last few years, and most of the card numbers you guys are throwing around in this thread mean nothing to me.

The 9800 doesn't even show up on this chart (http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-cards/3dmark06-v1-0-2-hdr-sm3-0-score,538.html) so don't even bother since you cannot go halfway down it and be playable.

Is the 9800 an SM 3.0 card?  At any rate, I like this chart for comparing video cards:  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics,1786-8.html (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics,1786-8.html) 

I see my Ti4200 on there.  Oh, there's my TNT...or was it a TNT2.  Good times, good times.


Here is an AoC forum post that listed the 9800 in the "bare minimum" category of video cards:  http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=239885&postcount=1 

For reference, I am playing on a PCIe x850xt 256MB video card, and it is listed in the "mid-range" category.  I also have 1GB DDR400 RAM running at 133MHz for some reason, and an AMD Athlon 64 3200+.  All around low specs, nothing overclocked.  I do pass the http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest (http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest) minimum requirements.

If I set things to "high" and randomly click some settings, I am around 17fps @ 1280x1024 in the Tortage areas.  If I go into earthquake-cam mode then I will get single digits.  PvP will likely force my computer to unplug itself and jump out the window.  If I set things to "low" and randomly click some settings, then I am around 30fps @ 1280x1024 in the Tortage areas.  The biggest fps boost I get is through drastically reducing viewing distance (I did not notice an fps difference in lowering 2800m to 1000m; I had to go looooow to get a significant fps jump).

If I had even 1/5th of the technical problems I read about on the AoC forums, I would have uninstalled this game immediately.  As it stands with my clunky computer, the only technical issue I have had is the sound in the opening movie stutters.  That's it.  If I decide to subscribe, I will make hardware upgrades.  I am still jolly over no auto-attack, and multi-mob melee sweeps. 


No, but for reference my load times are generally around a minute, sometimes less and sometimes more.  I am running a 7200rpm SATA HD.  I also have on-board audio.

Ah, thanks for the info.  Maybe I'll attempt it then, since I pretty much have the exact same processor and RAM setup as you do.

Also, I saw somewhere that a basic test for running AOC was that if you could run Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, then you can probably run the game.  I can run that as well (though shittily) so I guess theres a chance, heh.

I may have found the solution to my FPS issue- ended up with another game killing bug and am in the process of reloading the damn game.  Crazy as it sounds - Windows XP SP3 seems to have done the trick.  Only catch is I fucking cannot log a character in (can get up to character screen) due to it saying I am using the incorrect client now- no idea why it is doing that.  And yes, I did revalidate the game.


 :oh_i_see:





edit.  Twelve hours and counting getting it to work. 

Yeesh, that's wierd.

I've heard separately that SP3 has some problems. Damned if I can't find that article. I'll be holding off on that, but am interested to see if your problem (including being able to, like, log in :wink:) is solved.

My specs are:  3Ghz CPU, 2G RAM, x1600 Radeon, Windows XP.

Upgraded to SP3 along with latest Catalyst drivers (do not load the 8.6 Beta drivers!!!).  Hit the High graphic option, then went to advance and turned everything down/off.  Set Shadow to 2.0 - I am now running around 22FPS when lots is going on, around 40+ at best. 

I took the chance and dived in today. Pleased to announce that so far, the game is quite playable on my puny system (2.0 Core Duo/256 meg ATI X1400/1 Gig and on an external drive no less). I 'll probably spring for the extra memory later but so far it's actually performed a bit better than WoW in that my fans don't sporadically come on to cool things down. I was expecting things to redline but running on the stock Low settings with a res of 1280x700 (or whatever the second highest widescreen res is) I only occasionally get the slideshow effect. Shrubbery and other foliage seem to be the biggest culprits. FPS is about on par with EQ:SoL when I had my old Celeron 500 and GeForce 2 card. It's slightly ugly but enjoyable.