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Testing Age of Conan: Gamespot's hardware roundup + performance guide


You got bills to pay, no computer upgrades in a year, heck maybe it's been two or three, and here comes along Age of Conan with eye-dazzling effects that you must play. It also comes with launch bugs that don't ease the stress on your computer or your nerves for that matter. Crash after crash will leave you infuriated, the problem could be drivers, maybe the PSU can't handle the load, or it's poor optimization code -- whatever it is let the debugging process begin.

PC Gaming really does need some better standards, especially MMOs, but let's get back the basic computer hardware needed to run Age of Conan. What hardware will make it run like a champ, and what hardware will even run the game at all in case Grandma wants to chop some heads off in Hyboria on the most sluggish computer. Everything you need to know is available in this in-depth, fantastic hardware performance guide by Gamespot.



Age of the Conan
is put to the test on various system builds and the results are very informative. NVIDIA video cards will run Age of Conan much smoother than ATI cards. In fact, ATI cards pretty much blow chunks when it comes to running Age of Conan. The budget 8800 GT 512 MB card actually runs the game almost as well as the more expensive 9800 GTX on a higher resolution making it a great all around pick. Of course, in Age of Conan's cities the 9800 GTX will shine.

When it comes to the amount of ram there is no difference performance wise between 3GB ram and 2GB ram. If you don't feel like upgrading any computer hardware you can try turning off some of the graphical effects to help improve your gaming performance. The guide has side by side image quality comparisons to help decide what graphical effects you want to sacrifice that might help increase the game's performance.

So how does your computer hold up outside from the end game siege warfare?