I'm not hating or anything but the road I traveled to get Age of Conan playable with a reasonable amount of performance was LONG. Please note that my computer which is a Dell XPS 3.2Ghz Duo Core, 3 GB RAM and Radeon 850XT was more than the minimum requirements. It should have been somewhere near medium performance expectations. I did expect to have to tweak a few things or update drivers since I'd heard that people with ATI graphics cards in the BETA had issues. The luck of the Gods was not with me. I didn't fall into the "Magic Combination" of factors that produced a reasonable registration, installation and optimization that many others did experience.
I think a person with average computer competency would have given up. I almost did. I never did hear from Tech Support. I contacted Amazon to see if they'd take the game back since I couldn't register the key and hadn't had a timely resolution from Funcom and they said yes. I'm a HUGE amazon customer and I knew they'd take anything back within reason.
I decided to give it few more tries and over the course of another day and evening, I finally got the game working to an acceptable level. GO BEST BUY GEEK SQUAD. I was at the point of just giving in when I decided to take it there. I think many people would have and WILL bail if they encounter this many issues.
I'll let this picture speak for itself. You'll want to click the image to view the larger version.
The 850XT ranks as the worst video card I have owned. I'm surprised that AoC is even playable on that hunk-of-junk. hehe. :)
Posted by: Krones | May 28, 2008 at 11:12 PM
Once I did get in the game the card started overheating. I replaced it with Nvidia 9800 but my UPS couldn't handle the watts. Finally ended up with 8800 + the trick of setting the graphics on HIGH vs. Low and I'm good to go. Now if I could just settle on a class I'd be set. :-)
Posted by: Saylah | May 29, 2008 at 12:43 AM
Wow I had some problems with my Radeon 1950x but nothing too bad. I was just getting very low FPS no matter what setting I was using.
Steps I had to take to Play:
1) Had to use config.exe to go into windowed mode to get past the first black screen
15-20 FPS in Tortage upon first arrival
2) Bought 2 GB RAM to bring me up to 4GB
20-28 FPS in Tortage
3) Turned off personal shadows
30-40 FPS in Tortage, Get 70-100 in instances now
I love playing the melee classes so far. I have a Herald of Xolti which is technically under the mage tree but he plays like a warrior who also breaths fire. My friend says necromancers are fun and I've seen him running around with a small army of undead after a lucky string of fatalities.
Posted by: Relmstein | May 29, 2008 at 09:53 AM
Ugh... Sounds like my system is going to have a few problems...
Posted by: Wolfgangdoom | May 29, 2008 at 03:08 PM
8800 line are fantastic cards, that's what I use now. I don't think I'll go with ATI for awhile after all the headaches from the 850XT. That was quite the journey you went through just to play the game. You really are patient!
Posted by: Krones | May 29, 2008 at 03:53 PM
I hope I didn't do the proverbial, "good money after bad". I felt compelled to get it working since I'd already paid for the game.
I'm also going to dabble in the classes I think I might like before picking a main. I'm hearing it's rather quest heavy and I'm not into Alts until my main is max and progressed into end game content and crafting. So I want to be really sure before I get into serious leveling.
Posted by: Saylah | May 29, 2008 at 06:11 PM