Sager NP5793 Age Of Conan Mini Review

This is a mini review of my current system, what performance I get with Age of Conan, and what I did to get it.

Current System:
Sager NP5793
17" 1680x1050
T9300 @ 2.5Ghz 4GB RAM
8800M GTX 512MB
200GB 7200 RPM

OS:
Windows Vista 64 (SP1)

I did some things to optimize Vista such as turning off UAC, turn off file indexing, running CCLeaner, defrag hard drive etc. A link to the guide I followed is here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

I also updated the video driver that Sager provided (167.44) to their latest blessed release (174.90).

My 3DMark06 with 167.44 driver.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77/VideoDriverUpgrade/photo#5207788065932317922

My Nvidia Settings with 167.44 driver.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77/VideoDriverUpgrade/photo#5207788052721415890

My Windows performance with 167.44 driver.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77/VideoDriverUpgrade/photo#5207788077375604082

My 3DMark06 with 174.90 driver.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77/VideoDriverUpgrade/photo#5207788135591241986

My 3DMark06 went from 9033 to 9134 with most of the gains coming in the SM2.0 score. I have been running with this driver for a couple of weeks and I haven't had any problems; so as of right now I plan on sticking with it since there appears to be some improvement.

My Nvidia Settings with 174.90 driver.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77/VideoDriverUpgrade/photo#5207788112852461586

Just showing that yes my driver did update and I am running with 174.90.

My Windows performance with 174.90 driver.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77/VideoDriverUpgrade/photo#5207788125247205938

My windows performance went down from 5.1 to 5.0 based on the memory metric. Who knows why this would even happen since the only thing I changed was the video driver. I do not have much confidence in how MS comes up with these numbers.

Those are all the performance tweaks I made which I think give me the best bang for my buck with the least amount of effort. I am content with the performance of my system so I opted to not mess with OC'ing anything.

Age of Conan Settings:

Once in the game I set the video options to High and the only thing I modify is setting the system memory texture cache size to 512MB; I am also running at my native resolution 1680x1050.

Screenshot of my settings...
http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77/VideoDriverUpgrade/photo#5207788164604706898

I have been playing the game for over a week and running around all of the areas and typically get FPS of 25-55 (outside) FPS 45-75 (indoors/dungeons). Occasionally, in very congested areas in the towns/cities I may get brief drops down in the 10-20 FPS, but this doesn’t happen very often and is so brief it isn't a problem.

If for whatever reason this performance just isn't good enough for you, if you turn the shadows off, reflections off, and knock the Shader Model down to 2.0 from 3.0. You will see at least 60 FPS everywhere. You will actually see a pretty big boost in performance if you only knock the Shader Model down to 2.0 from 3.0 and leave shadows on; maybe a 5-10FPS boost.

Some in game images:

All of the images were taken on the default High settings at a 1680x1050 resolution. Of course there is some compression losses when converting to the .png format so they should actually look even better at the same settings/resolution on your pc.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfgreen77

Age of Conan the Game so far:

If you like RPGs and MMORPGs I don't really see how you could not like this game. The graphics are great, the music and sound effects are 10/10, and the game play and story so far are very good. I am currently a lv 42 Barbarian so I have ventured around quite a bit and I have been able to experience a good portion of the game. Don't listen to any noob reviews of somebody who quit without even leaving Tortage (you need to be at least lv 20). You don't even get crafting or are able to get a mount until lv 40. I feel this game has a lot of potential with the city building and siege battles, but that has yet to be seen. My guild just built their first keep which I must say it was very cool watching it go up!

I must also add that I am not a fanboy, this is the first MMORPG that I have every played so I can't really compare it to anything else, but I have played a lot of the old standard RPGs. There are definitely some issues with the game, the first being the decent amount of bugs. I have had the game crash on me several times and there are some buggy quests later in the game that just don’t work yet. The Tortage area worked seamlessly, it seems Funcom spent more time debugging and testing the first area and just didn't have time to get everything polished before marketing forced them to push the game out the door. There have been regular patches and they have fixed a lot of issues so far... as long as they keep it up I can see most of the major issues being smoothed out over the next month or two.

On one last note the game takes a long time to install ~2 hours and takes up 25 GB of disk space. That install time does not include the patching that you will have to do... after the install I had ~600MB of patches. From the time of sitting down to install the game until you can actually get into the game and do something; be expected to wait at least 3 hours.

 

good mini review

 

The 25GB disk space is scary

And good review.

 

I'm playing on my P4 3.0 Ghz 1GB RAM 7800GS AGP system right now. I can not wait to get my new lappy. This thing almost looks like warcraft 3 with EVERYTHING low. I don't even have grass! There is such a difference in settings!