Performance

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

The name of Conan is well known to every admirer of heroic fantasy and even to people who are not into fantasy at all. The Cimmerian barbarian created by Robert Ervin Howard is one of the most recognizable fantasy characters of the 20th century. As the name suggests, the game draws upon the world described by that writer. From a technical standpoint, it runs on the DreamWorld engine, developed by the Norwegian company Funcom Productions which is also the developer of Age of Conan itself. The engine is complemented with a foliage generation system called SpeedTree.

The picture provided by the AoC engine looks good just as you can expect from a May 20, 2008 release. It makes a wide use of complex shaders, has a per-pixel lighting model, an advanced shading system, a dynamic cloud generation system based on the so-called Perlin noise, and, starting from March 2009, supports DirectX 10.

Of course, Age of Conan is inferior to Crysis-like 3D shooters that implement the newest advances in 3D graphics, yet its system requirements are quite high at the highest visual quality settings, at least for people who have inexpensive graphics cards. We did not even use 4x FSAA in this game in order to achieve playable frame rates without lowering other settings. Here are the results:

Well, it looks like you have to lower some settings in order to play this game comfortably. It is only the rather expensive GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 that can ensure some comfort at 1280x1024. The complete failure of the Radeon HD 4670 suggests that this card’s rather weak computing resources and low memory bandwidth are a bottleneck in this game. ATI’s new solutions are overall good enough, though. The Radeon HD 4770 is no worse than the GeForce GTS 250 and even ahead of the latter at low resolutions. The Radeon HD 4830 is hamstringed by its low core frequency while the GeForce 9600 GT has inadequate computing resources.

These results suggest that you should choose nothing less than a GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 if you want to experience Age of Conan fully. You can’t save here by choosing a cheap graphics card. This game calls for a top-performance product like a GeForce GTX 285. Pretty visuals come at a high price here.