Age of Conan is one of the most demanding new games to date, but the upside to the steep hardware requirements is the ability to make use of the latest technology enhancements in the market. These include DirectX 10, 64-bit processing, and multi-core CPUs.

For those folks running Windows Vista, DX10 brings the latest graphics and multimedia effects into play, assuming you're in a position where you can enable them. Depending on your hardware and how DX10/DX10.1 is implemented in the game and your video card's drivers, you may or may not see performance benefits (or degradations) with these bells and whistles enabled. If the latest crop of DX10-enabled games (such as Crysis, Jericho, and Assassin's Creed) are any indication, further optimization (via driver updates and game patches) will almost certainly be forthcoming to boost frame rates while maintaining all the fanciest eye candy effects.

Do yourself a pre-emptive favor and hit your video card manufacturer's web site to get the latest and greatest drivers -- nVidia released new ones this week. Chances are, another round of updates will be coming along soon, as is often the case in the wake of a major game release. However, being current with all your drivers is a good way to ensure the best performance on day one. Thankfully, the days of driver updates coming out seemingly every three days, and some of them being a step backwards in performance, image quality, or in some regrettable cases both, are pretty much long behind us.

On the processor front, Age of Conan is going to be able to take advantage of that second (and hopefully third and fourth) processor core to spread the load and speed up performance as well. By the same token, being able to utilize 64 bit code, not to mention the larger address space this allows (32 bit operating systems can only address and make use of 4GB of RAM) means that more programming gymnastics are possible as well. Multi-threading is one area where point releases are a gamer's best friend. Crysis is Exhibit A in this regard; despite boasting rig-melting demands, it wasn't until patch 1.2 that its multi-threading and multi-video-adapter (SLI/Crossfire) capabilities were more fully optimized; I would expect that AoC is going to exhibit a similar learning curve.

If I'm completely wrong in this, and the beta client spreads the load well across multiple CPUs/GPUs, so much the better -- the only way performance can go is up anyways. Reports from some folks in the beta indicate that They Are Not Kidding about the steep hardware demands - even a 2.6 GHz C2D system with a GeForce 8600 was brought to its knees by long load times and abysmal frame rates. Others have indicated that graphics effects, primarily with shaders, were not rendering well (and had to be rebuilt/recompiled every time they played, since crashes would prevent them from being saved); fortunately, this latter situations seems to be less of an issue with more recent beta code updates, and performance has improved from a mediocre 15FPS to an entirely palatable 30-60FPS.

The general consensus is that there are a couple things your PC will struggle with if it's much below the "Recommended" specs. The two biggest potential bottlenecks are both RAM-related - initial zone loads are a serious slowdown, rendering systems with less than 2GB of RAM at a disadvantage, and video cards sporting less than 512MB of RAM are really seeing their framerates suffer, regardless of how far down the resolution and effects are set.

Lastly, for those folks who might be inclined to let their youngsters play, it also supports Parental Controls in Windows Vista. Maybe you should start them out with something a bit less intense, however. May I recommend World of Warcraft or perhaps Hello Kitty Online?



[Big thanks to the gang at Team Massively for providing feedback from your beta time with the game; not all of us were fortunate enough to get in, not that we're jealous or anything.]

Rafe Brox spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you also share an unhealthy passion for PC hardware or know a good place he can get help for this addiction, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.