Age of Conan - The Quest for Lost Performance
Our Age of Conan review is still being written, but in the meantime - let's talk about the tech side of things. Many people have complained that the game runs like crap while others claim it works fine. I'll try to sort out the urban legends from the facts and attempt to give some advice on improving the performance of Age of Conan. Age of Conan used to be utterly unplayable slideshow during most of the beta - a lot of information available online is woefully outdated and refers to the battles people faced to get the game run properly during the beta. Performance varied as engine bugs got fixed, but also due to the moving goalposts as the pre-defined "Low", "Medium" and "High" settings got defined and re-defined. Biggest change happened during the last two weeks before the "Early Access" launch started, and the improvements done then were nothing short of miraculous. Yet Age of Conan still doesn't run well on systems that meet the requirements, and after banging my head to the desk for a good while, I must admit partial defeat - most of the available settings do little to improve performance, and while I can provide some help to get the looks to an acceptable state without killing your framerate, no system will take default "High" settings at smooth framerates. The engine is still unfinished and can produce wildly varying results depending on your hardware, sometimes with no clear cause and effect. While the performance improved on every system during late beta, you have to also remember that it moved from "utterly unplayable" to " OK - well, kind of". Now people are trying to make the game run truly smooth (constant 60fps+) and that's a whole another story.
All testing for this article was done using the DX9 mode, simply because DX10 is not yet included - yep, the box says "Enchanced for DX 10", but it's pretty much a lie as the feature got cut somewhere along the way - probably when Funcom noticed that even the DirectX 9 mode of the engine was an utter mess. Its current status is "to be patched in later" with no ETA. Only indication about the schedule is the promise to demonstrate it at the Leipzig Games Convention 2008 in August.
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