Date:
Sunday , June 08, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Age of Conan Gameplay Performance and IQ

Age of Conan, the most graphically advanced MMORPG we've ever seen, boasts over 400,000 copies sold in the first two weeks! We've played the game on six of today's most popular video cards and share our experiences.

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Performance - Highest Playable

For our evaluation procedure, we chose a simple, repeatable path through the city Tarantia, capital of Aquilonia on the game map. We started at the dock, where new players arrive fresh from the introductory instance, and traveled to the east gate, out of the gate as far east as we could walk and back again, and then on to the west gate. We then went through the west gate and continued as far west as we could go, turned around and returned to the city. Back in the city, we turned southward toward the Auction House, then toward the nobles district. At the head of the nobles district bridge, we turned out sights back toward the docks, concluding the test by arriving at the ship to Stygia. The whole procedure takes about 7 minutes.

We chose this route because we found overall performance to be at its lowest in the city, chiefly due to its high level of geometric detail, its high NPC count, and the constant deluge of other human players. Ultimately, we found that a graphics configuration that is playable in Tarantia will be playable throughout Hyboria.

Graphics Options

Graphics options abound in Age of Conan. The options are surprisingly complete, allowing the user to select a full range of standard and wide aspect ratio resolutions, multisampling options, and even texture filtering options, as well as game content related settings.

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Basic Tab

Starting from the beginning on the "Basic" settings tab, we have 3 macro setting buttons: "Low", "Medium", and "High". These buttons allow you to quickly change between a range of preset configurations. Note that the "High" option does not enable maximum settings. Not even close. Then there is the standard resolution dropdown box, followed by a checkbox to toggle fullscreen operation, and an anti-aliasing dropdown box. In the AA dropdown, the full range of your video cards AA capabilities will be shown. This means that you could potentially select 2X, 4X, and all the way up to 16xQ if you have an NVIDIA video card, or up to 8X on AMD video cards. Beneath the AA option is a group of options for tone control, and a "Bloom" option, which enables bloom lighting if you have the horsepower. Then there is the "View Distance" slider. This slider is listed in meters and changes the range at which certain landscape objects are either drawn or not.

Advanced Tab

Clicking over to the "Advanced" tab, we see a LOT more options, the first of which is your shader model. As we write this, DirectX 10 support in Age of Conan is tantalizingly disabled, so there is no shader model 4.0 option here. The available shader model options are 3.0, 2.x, and 2.0. In our view, anything below 3.0 looks like absolute crap, and we would just rather not play the game at that level. We do, however, eagerly await the SM4 option.

Moving on, we find a group of shadow options. The "Shadow Quality" option would be more accurately described as "Shadow Quantity", as the options are "None", "From Characters Only", and "From Everything". Predictably enough, setting it to "None" turns off shadows completely, and setting it to "From Characters Only" causes only characters to cast shadows. The next option, "Shadow Resolution", controls the size of the shadow map. The "3D Ambient Occlusion" option is somewhat complicated. Ambient occlusion is a lighting technique used to make objects appear more realistic by causing an object's neighboring objects to affect the object's shading. NVIDIA has some good documentation (link to PDF) on Ambient Occlusion for anyone interested.

The next 7 sliders under the section labeled "View Ranges" control the distances at which specific types of objects such as NPCs, grass, and particles are drawn, and some range options for the High Quality versions of those objects.

Next up is the "System Memory Texture Cache Size" slider. Interestingly, clicking the "Low", "Medium", or "High" macro settings buttons seems to ignore this slider altogether. By moving the slider to the right, the user allows the game to reserve a chunk of system memory for texture storage. Caching textures to system memory can result in lower access times for those textures, assuming the game manages the cache correctly. The maximum value for this option varies with the video card and the amount of system memory in the computer. In our test system, equipped with 2GB of system memory, we had a maximum cache size of 309MB when using NVIDIA video cards, and 312MB when using AMD video cards. Then, when we checked the option on a system with 4GB of system memory and GeForce 8800 Ultra, the option went up to 512MB.

After the cache slider, we have "Texture Filtering Quality" (Bilinear, Trilinear Anisotropic), Texture Resolution (low, medium, high), and Anisotropic filtering quality, which goes up to 16X in single unit increments. Then we see a Parallax Mapping checkbox, which clearly enabled parallax mapping for enhancing the illusion of depth of flat, textured surfaces. AMD has a good overview (link to PDF) to describe the function of parallax mapping.

The "Enable advanced transparency" option enables transparent texture anti-aliasing, but is only available if anti-aliasing is enabled on the "Basic" tab. The next option is pretty interesting: "Remove Foliage From Around Character." It dithers foliage textures that may otherwise cover up the player's character if the character is moving around among trees and such. Its purpose seems to be to allow the player to always see his or her character, even if the character is hidden behind some foliage.

The ground section is home to just two options: "Ground Render Quality", and "Enable Grass." The ground render quality option seems to mostly modify the resolution of the texture applied to ground surfaces, both up close, and at range. The grass checkbox simple toggles the grass on the ground, which is similar to the grass in Oblivion, although a lot less demanding.

Finally, the "Water reflection quality" option is very similar to the "Shadow quality" option before, and may be more accurately described as Water reflection quantity. The three options are "None", "From Ground Only", and "From Everything". When set to none, no objects reflect in the water. When set to "From Ground only", only actual world geometry such as hills, mountains, and shorelines reflect in the water. And when set to "From Everything", every object, including people, boats, trees, and buildings, cast reflections into the water.

Highest Playable Settings

NOTE: Due to the extensive graphics options supported by this game, we are not depicting every option we selected for each video card in our settings table. If we did, the table would be ridiculously huge. Instead, we are showing only the options that we changed in our efforts to balance performance and image quality from video card to video card. Any options not listed on the below tables are set to the options shown in the configuration screenshot at the top of this page.

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Unfortunately, at these relatively high resolutions, Bloom lighting turned out to be just too demanding for any of the video cards we tested here. When we enabled bloom, our framerates plummeted and the game became horribly unresponsive. In the end, we felt that a higher operating resolution was more important than Bloom lighting.

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GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce 9800 GTX

We found that the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 and the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX had the same highest playable setting, and with very little difference in performance, in spite of the fact that the GeForce 9800 GX2 has 2 GPUs on board. We checked with NVIDIA, and they confirm that SLI is supported in the game. At 1920x1200, we were able to use 16X AF and very high in-game settings, but AA was out of the question. Maximum viewing distance was playable, however, giving these video cards an ever-so-slight advantage over the Radeon HD 3870 X2. Age of Conan, like other MMO games such as EverQuest and WoW, may simply not scale well with a multi-GPU configuration.

Radeon HD 3870 X2

We tried to run the Radeon HD 3870 X2 at the same configuration as the GeForce 9800 GX2 and GTX, but the extra load proved too much. The higher landscape view distance (by 700m) and the higher HG view distance introduced too much lag into the gameplay, so we were forced to dial those options back to 2800m on the overall view distance, and 75% on the HQ view distance. The actual impact on gameplay was minimal however, with only a few areas showing reduced detail due to the reduced view distance sliders.

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GeForce 8800 GT

Surprisingly, we found that the GeForce 8800 GT was quite playable with the same settings as were the GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce 9800 GTX. Our average framerate was ever-so-slightly lower with the GeForce 8800 GT, but it was still playable and the gameplay did not suffer for the minute lost frames.

GeForce 9600 GT

On the other hand, the GeForce 9600 GT didn't fare nearly as well as the GeForce 8800 GT. At 1920x1200, we found ourselves having to lower too many settings and the gameplay suffering too much because of it. So, we lowered the game down to 1600x1200 with 16X AF, and brought our gameplay settings back up. Even still, we had to disable parallax mapping, and set the shadow resolution and ambient occlusion settings down to low. That still wasn't enough, so we lowered the HG view distance to 75% and overall draw distance to 2009 meters, and it was finally playable again.

Radeon HD 3870

This time, the ATI Radeon HD 3870 outperformed the GeForce 9600 GT. Not only was it able to run at a higher resolution, it was able to do so with higher gameplay settings. At 1920x1200 and 16X AF, we had to turn the overall draw distance down to 2800m, and the high quality draw distance down to 75%. But we were able to enable parallax mapping, giving us better lighting effects on flat surfaces than the GeForce 9600 GT was able to do.