Age of Conan Benchmarks

             Every now and then there's a game that takes the PC gaming community by storm coming out of nowhere to rack up huge sales numbers in what people have been calling a dead market since the days of the PlayStation One and Nintendo 64. The one this year is Age of Conan, the MMORPG from Funcom, which has sold 500,00 copies since it's release to June 1st with undoubtedly many more sold since then. The company was best known for Anarchy Online and clearly have struck MMORPG gold with Age of Conan. Age of Conan runs off the Dreamworld graphics engine which Funcom originally developed in 2000 for Anarchy Online. Funcom decided with Age of Conan to try and take this further and develop the engine more so to bring it up to date for gameplay, graphics, and more. This includes such things as Cheetah, their own renderer used to apply shadows to everything in game, SpeedTree which works on creating better quality graphics for foliage, and in the future Funcom plans to support Microsoft's DirectX 10 API. Currently Age of Conan only uses Microsoft's DirectX 9 so we'll be looking at that in our performance testing. Consensus all around though is that Age of Conan is a top tier MMORPG with a very advanced graphics engine so it's something we definitely wanted to benchmark. We used FRAPS through a 40 second run through the game in an area without any other variables to adjust the frames per second. Here is our start position and then end.   Here is our test system. Mother Board Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wi-Fi, Asus Crosshair II Formula CPU AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition Video Card Various Memory Corsair XMS Dominator 2GB Hard Drive Western Digital Raptor Case Tsunami Thermaltake Display Samsung 305T ATI Catalyst 8.6 and nForce 159.17 drivers were used on Vista Ultimate SP1.   Start: End:    Here are our graphic settings for the game.     As you can see we ran at fairly high quality settings.   Now onto the benchmark results.         In our results we see cards like the 9600 GT or cards from a few years ago such as the Radeon 1950 Pro struggle. The Radeon 1950 Pro isn't playable at any resolution but then again we were running at fairly high settings. We've heard of some problems with Crossfire and SLI with the game but for us it ran excellently and more than doubled scores at times. ATI's new Radeon 4850 is especially powerful and we're interested in how fast the Radeon 4870 will be which we should get soon. Scores from the 4850 to Crossfire more than double. We see similar results from the 9600 GT and 9800 GTX. This game doesn't really seem to prefer one card over the other with the Radeon 3870 and 9600 GT, 8800 GT fairly matched and also with the 4850 against a 9800 GTX. We're looking forward to how DirectX10 might change things and hope Funcom releases a patch soon. To play the game at maximum settings today though you definitely need a fairly high-end card, at least a 9600 GT to 3850 or above in performance.       '); //-->

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