Age of conan, Open beta: May 1st 2008.

[Hound]

Win XP here, 175 are Vista drivers.

I run the 175beta drivers without problems on windows XP with a 7900 gtx.

The freezing improved when I disabled indexing and defragmented the funcom folder. When you enter a new zone there will always be a bit of stuttering because of the shader caching.

interesting

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_175.12.html

I have 174.93 installed right now which are the 13 April XP drivers

Been there done that on defrag (Defraggler). Problem is I freeze anytime I try and move anything from inventory to main character or access the options screen.  Those are two things that are sure to set it off, there are probably more but the game will not run long enough for me to find them. Even if I do not try and get into options or change out my newbie gear it will freeze after about 10 minutes of play.

[lac]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_175.16_beta.html

This is the one I run.

[Hound]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_175.16_beta.html

This is the one I run.

ok the beta drivers, I think I tried those. If the patch does not work I may try them again.

[Mrbloodworth]

If this is bad to post, please remove my posting. I'm not in the closed beta, its just from what i have read off the internets, so it must be true.

But apparently, the miracle patch is real, and it hit closed beta today. Most places are reporting that about 89% of all performance issues (the one constantly talked about that is, shader, loading, zoning.) are gone.

[krazyk]

Yeah I noticed an improvement in load times. Before they were like 10 minutes + now they're less than 30 seconds. Only hitching I get is upon zone in then I just do a 360 spin and it clears it up.

[Signe]

My performance on the open beta today was pretty good. Everyone enjoyed it.  First I took off my shirt and put it on my head, then I made swish swish noises with my sword and, finally, I climbed a ladder and jumped off just an inch or so from the ground and completely depleted my hit points.

They need to do something about falling damage... it's completely over the top.  Also, I'm not getting the lag and graphic stalling and stuff as bad as I was yesterday.  But that varies from day to day. 

[Ingmar]

My performance on the open beta today was pretty good. Everyone enjoyed it.  First I took off my shirt and put it on my head, then I made swish swish noises with my sword and, finally, I climbed a ladder and jumped off just an inch or so from the ground and completely depleted my hit points.

They need to do something about falling damage... it's completely over the top.  Also, I'm not getting the lag and graphic stalling and stuff as bad as I was yesterday.  But that varies from day to day. 

Last night, post-patch (open beta) my performance problems were still terrible, even after I cranked the settings down to 'low'. Interestingly I haven't noticed a problem with falling damage. I wonder if having a high climb skill helps?

[Signe]

Maybe that's it!  I didn't see any point in putting anything past 1 in climbing.  Maybe you found the point!   

[Mrbloodworth]

Just to be clear, i was talking about the closed beta. And i also just realized that people can talk about it, as performance is part of the 1-13 experience.

[tazelbain]

I get lagged just thinking about buying a Funcom game.

[Nija]

Contrary to popular belief and common sense, you still don't need to spend any points in climbing. It does effectively nothing. It never has.

[Draegan]

The CB patch was put off a while yesterday.  Can't wait to get home and check it out.

[Mrbloodworth]

The CB patch was put off a while yesterday.  Can't wait to get home and check it out.

Please post your results.

[Falconeer]

Results: very good, here.

[Signe]

Contrary to popular belief and common sense, you still don't need to spend any points in climbing. It does effectively nothing. It never has.

Yep.  I went in and put a whole bunch in climbing and falling damage is still OTT, in my opinion.  Maybe it makes a difference later on, but not at level 13 and under.

The thingy on the 10th will probably be like a super fucked up slide show.  We'll see.  I wish they would have allowed more chat about crafting.  If the crafting is awful or tedious, I'll probably not play for long.  I like PvP, and especially sieging, but I need all the shiny stuff, too.  I've become mushy and girlie since SB.

[Draegan]

Well up to now, I've never had a problem with my fps and becoming a slide show at all.  It's always been the "stuttering" due to texturing loading.  I guess that's the same thing, but It's either 40-50fps or 0.

[Signe]

I mean because of the event.  They only have a few servers and I'm sure tons of people will play. 

[Draegan]

The CB patch was put off a while yesterday.  Can't wait to get home and check it out.

Please post your results.

 

All I can say, "Wow".  Well I guess someone had to produce a miracle patch one of these days.  This is only performance based.  There are things that need to be fixed, like itemization etc.

[Signe]

Maybe we can get our own sticky in the graveyard when the 3 day pre-launch launch launches.

[KallDrexx]

Yep, stalling is definitely gone, loading times seem a bit better and I get about 10-15 more fps in tortage today in closed beta.

[Merusk]

Holy crap, I can actually move around and play again.  Hooray for the miracle patch. 

[sam, an eggplant]

The new closed patch disabled shader model 3.0 on cards that support it but aren't fast enough to actually run well. It also improved loading speeds quite a bit for most people, but some are reporting major FPS drops. It wasn't a panacea but the majority are seeing much improved performance.

[tmp]

I'm genuinely impressed with these reports of 11th hour miracle patch that actually worked. I mean, seriously, that'd be like first. So if they pulled it off good work and all that.

[Triforcer]

A miracle patch that worked?  No wai. 

[Venkman]

It wasn't a miracle fix. From reports, it seems more like a last minute lowering of graphical overhead. Same result (can play the game), different means (they didn't bring everyone up, they brought the game down).

[sam, an eggplant]

Well it also substantially improved loading times, but that may be a side effect of disabling SM3.0.

[HRose]

It wasn't a miracle fix. From reports, it seems more like a last minute lowering of graphical overhead. Same result (can play the game), different means (they didn't bring everyone up, they brought the game down).

From what I read they had problem with memory fragmentation/memory leaks, and those aren't hard to fix nowadays. The stalling/loading instead seemed due to the shaders compiling.

WoW in beta used to have huge slowdowns when you were flying from Ironforge to Stormwind in beta due to memory fragmentation, and that was also easily fixed.

[tmp]

It wasn't a miracle fix. From reports, it seems more like a last minute lowering of graphical overhead. Same result (can play the game), different means (they didn't bring everyone up, they brought the game down).

They mentioned something about one of "sikrit dev builds" having the shader compilation made async (which is what it probably should've been to begin with but that's another story) so thought that's the change that went live. If they just lowered the gfx bar... oh well, that's not actually bad thing in itself. They can always patch in the "graphics for the future" in that very future when/if it ever comes. Having playable launch *and* possibly gfx upgrade down the road seems like better PR potential than people screaming blue murder because they can''t play on the first day.

[Slayerik]

Im personally very shocked and optimistic about the miracle patch reports.

If they can deliver some fun, I'm down...

Hey Signe, I haven't got a PM from ya about joining my guild :))))

[KallDrexx]

From what I read they had problem with memory fragmentation/memory leaks, and those aren't hard to fix nowadays. The stalling/loading instead seemed due to the shaders compiling.

Memory leaks aren't hard to fix?  How much complex pieces of software have you worked on?

They may have become easier to fix, but in a lot of cases it is still hard to track them down and it is far from easy.

[Signe]

Im personally very shocked and optimistic about the miracle patch reports.

If they can deliver some fun, I'm down...

Hey Signe, I haven't got a PM from ya about joining my guild :))))

How much does it pay?

[Brogarn]

I get lagged just thinking about buying a Funcom game.

hehhehehe

I played AO during beta and a bit into release. I recall those agonizingly painful wonderful times. Spend 20 minutes fighting through the lag to get across the city just to rubberband back to where you started. Running at the zone line... and right on through it into the sunset. *wipes a tear away* Good times good times. Pardon me while I go poke my finger through my eye into my brain and swirl it around a bit.

[Ixxit]

From what I read they had problem with memory fragmentation/memory leaks, and those aren't hard to fix nowadays. The stalling/loading instead seemed due to the shaders compiling.

Memory leaks aren't hard to fix?  How much complex pieces of software have you worked on?

They may have become easier to fix, but in a lot of cases it is still hard to track them down and it is far from easy.

One of the prerequisites of "Arm-Chair" design is a high  degree of delusional omnipotence.

[Khaldun]

Christ on a stick, but now I'm almost thinking of playing this.

[Tarami]

Memory leaks aren't easier to fix - they just happen less nowadays when 90% of the memory allocation even in high-performance applications is done through a manager that garbage collects. The same 90% of the code isn't really performance sensitive to the point where manual memory management serves a purpose.

The actual leaks are just as damn bad to track down if not worse.