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Morning Discussion

by Jeff "geedeck" Gondek, May 27, 2008 6:11am PDT

So did everyone have a good weekend? Things are settling into the summer around here, probably going to start getting a clear feel for fall and holiday releases which is a bit exciting, as this should be a really great one on all platforms. First up, I've got a contest for everyone to view and vote for the submissions of Shacker's favorite gaming moments, so let's see who can pick up three months of FileShack from that. In other news, it seems that more than a few people have picked up Age of Conan, how do you guys like it? Plus, new Dr. Mario!


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  • #4465
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    By: Master Tonberry x
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    AGE OF CONAN PERFORMANCE MENZ

    I thought, since playing Age of Conan for a while now and having some issues it may be worth sharing some technical bullshit ive learned that may fix some performance issues you may have experienced. Most of these relate to view distance settings and I am not saying these will work for everyone, but some of these methods have worked for me, and I would appreciate anymore suggestions for making this game run as it should.

    My system is as follows;
    Asus A8N32 SLI Deluxe
    AMD x2 4400+ @ 2.6Ghz
    2 x 1Gb Corsair DDR @ 227Mhz
    GeForce 8800GT 512Mb
    XFI-Xtreme Music
    3 x 250Gb HDD
    1680x1050 Samsung

    When I started playing this game I was achieving 35+ FPS consistently, with 50+ FPS in certain areas, but as the game went on it gradually deteriorated to the point where I was getting 25 frames at most and 12 frames at least.

    These may not work for everyone, and there will be some fools out there with a single piece of advice consisting of;....... 'I own a quad-SLI 9800GTX + Q98-AWESOME XTREME + 90GB HIGH SPEED PWNAGE RAM so get a better system and stop whining'. To those I say my system is three years old apart from my 8800GT, and I refuse to accept less than 35fps @ 1680x1050 on any game except Crysis, which I played at 1440x900 at High/Very High @ 30+ fps.

    Basically, from what i have learned, a lot of Age of Conan's issues come from the way the game deals with GPU's.....so;

    1. Switch Anti-Aliasing off....then switch it back on.

    This seems to improve frames after playing for a few hours. From what I've heard....the game tends to have an issue with vram leaks. By switching this off and then back on, it seems to clear the vram cache.

    2. Turn 'Ground Texture View Distance' down to '100 Metres'

    This setting controls the resolution of distant ground textures, and when you reach the limit of your video memory the game tends to drop close range high resolution textures in order to correctly render distant ground textures. By this I mean that you may experience low resolution textures on buildings, ground, and NPC's if it is set too high. Basically, im pretty sure the human eye cannot distinguish the high-low resolution ground textures when they are being rendered so far in the distance. So do yourself a favour and set this to '100m' at most.

    3. Lower 'Particle Effects' to '500m'

    This seems to relate to effects generated by spells and general colourful combat. It's pretty certain that you will rarely see this stuff happening beyond 500m. So again, do yourself a favour and set this to 500. This will greatly relieve load on your CPU. For someone like me, whose CPU is fairly old and an obvious bottleneck this will give a good few frames.

    4. Delete the 'shader caches'.

    In the Age of Conan directory there should be three shader files. The game seems to always set the 'shader' option to High no matter what you set in game. So if you experience fewer frames than you believe you should be getting, delete these files and load up the game. Let the auto patcher update your files and the shaders will be updated. This has fixed issues with a lot of people, so if you have strange loss of FPS then try it.

    5. Turn 'NPC View Distance' down to half.

    Honestly, you may have noticed that no matter what you set this option to NPC's still tend to pop-in at fairly close distances, so do yourself another favour and set this to a respectable point. There is no point having this view distance at max when this kinda thing happens, and you will gain a fair few frames.

    6. Find a suitable balance between 'Grass Density' and 'Grass View Distance'

    Think about this one. Some of you may have rigs now that can handle grass levels beyond the Oblivion maximum for example (by going into the .ini and setting the distance to x2 the in-game maximum....like me lol). This is seriously unnecessary in this game because the engine renders grass in real time as you can view it. What is the point of assigning GPU power to render grass you will never see? So find a good balance. Personally I take the grass density down a notch ( I turn it down to about 90%) and set grass render distance to something like 80%.

    7. Shader Model 2.0 Issues.

    I don't know why, because i'm not a graphical tech head....but this game seems to have 'serious business' with shader model 2.0. A lot of bugs have been reported by people using SM2.0 and apprently the game does not deal well with it. So again, find yourself a good operating point and decide what is best for you. I use SM3.0 so this has never been an issue for me. Personally, I use SM3.0....so I have not tested this myself.

    8. Bloom

    Personally, bloom has never given me any shit in this game, apart from sand more or less blinding me. A number of people have expressed concerns that bloom can actually cripple their playing experience completely by dropping about 15 frames (again, I am not a tech head so I don't know why). Personally, I lose about 5fps with Bloom enabled, and despite the insane white levels in certain areas I believe it is best left on for atmospheric lighting.

    9. View Distance

    I believe this should always be left on maximum unless you have less than a 7900GTX or equivelant.
    By tuning the view distances of various game effects you should achieve a good balance. And I personally would rather see awesome skyline and ace ruins in the distance than see grass or high resolution rocks in a place i'm not gonna be able to travel to within the space of three seconds.

    10. Shitty MMO Launch.

    Age of Conan has just been released. A lot of the problems we have will be fixed (just like World of Shitcraft) and you just have to be patient. There are server and mesh/texture issues that will be fixed as the game progresses (how many patches has WoW had?). If after trying these fixes you still achiecve shitty performance then all I can suggest is to wait for more patches and look for more fixes on the intarwebs. If you are running a Voodoo3D 32Mb (awesome) and a Pentium 90Mhz then its kind of your own fault.

    To finish, I wanted to start this thread as a way to help those with crazy performajnce issues in this game, becasue the forums are still a bit borked. I DID NOT SAY THESE WILL DEFINITELY WORK, only that they have worked for other people.

    So, suggestions in reply please.
    May 27, 2008 7:26pm PDT

    Thread Truncated. Click to see all 21 replies.

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