Is that why the Vanguard terrain looks like total crap compared to AoC's ?   Of course anyone that has a crappy terrain system with low rez textures can crank out a large view distance. But to do it with nice realistic terrain is an entirely different story altogeather.

Originally posted by solareus

Originally posted by mrdoublerr

what pisses me off, I use to get decent fps at release but after a few patch the fps dropped, one of the main reason I quit, (8800 GT) 

 It's not your card, just remember that, the 8800 GT is very awesome peice of hardware .

I was getting 50-65 fps with full graphics in 1680x1050 up till June 9th.  From that patch onward I experianced less and less fps with each subsequent patch.   I quit playing about 2 weeks ago due to this and was getting roughly 25fps with the same settings that I experianced 50-65 with. 

I went through a LOT of different drivers trying to resolve the issue and haven't been able to yet. 

Not that it'll matter to most:  my machine is hitting 14882 in 3dmark06

asus p5e3 premium

e8400 @ 1600fsb 3.6ghz

2x1gb DDR3 1600 (7-7-7-20)

EVGA 8800gt Akimbo Superclock (720, 1750shader, 1000mem)

Regardless of the operating system I should not have the issues running the game that I do.  The REAL issue is, it ran better at launch and got worse with each patch!!

Funcom Tech support says this to fix it: you need 8gb of ram and Vista

blow me Funcom, you failed miserably!

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

 You wont see any other mmorpg with a view distance of 2 miles where you can turn everything up at 30" res and see better frame rates. Thats right. Because no other mmorpg lets you have the options too.

 

Dont know about that Avery it seems severall here have already proven you wrong on the draw distance thing and id just like to add that in my MMORPG i can see clearly for 300km's. Of course EvE is a very different game to AOC [such as having better life prospects and being set in space] but netherless it still counts.

"First off, the theme behind Dark and Light seems to be one of scale: the cluster technology used by Dark and Light supposedly allows for up to 500,000 players playing concurrently on the same server; the gameworld is 40,000 square kilometers in size; and the view distance lets you see up to 30 miles away."

gamespot article

So what you are saying is that you need a 1400 dollar processor, a 350 dollar mother board, 4 gigs of ram and Vista Ultimate 64 bit and 600 to 1000 dollars worth of video cards to get 60 FPS in AoC at 1680 x 1050 res. Hmmm I play  LoTRO completly maxxed, and EQII pretty much maxxed except shadows at 1680 x 1050 with my single  8800GTS using 2 gig of ram in Vista and a 189 dollar E8400 CPU in a 100 dollar Gigabyte motherboard and get better FPS and a prettier game in my opinion.

Originally posted by Jackdog

So what you are saying is that you need a 1400 dollar processor, a 350 dollar mother board, 4 gigs of ram and Vista Ultimate 64 bit and 600 to 1000 dollars worth of video cards to get 60 FPS in AoC at 1680 x 1050 res. Hmmm I play  LoTRO completly maxxed, and EQII pretty much maxxed except shadows at 1680 x 1050 with my single  8800GTS using 2 gig of ram in Vista and a 189 dollar E8400 CPU in a 100 dollar Gigabyte motherboard and get better FPS and a prettier game in my opinion.

Obviously this has something to do with the way the graphics engine was coded for it to be so inefficent.

Originally posted by mrdoublerr

what pisses me off, I use to get decent fps at release but after a few patch the fps dropped, one of the main reason I quit, (8800 GT)

 

Same here. I had better preformance at release then after the patches. They also keep adding invisable walls, and massive slowdowns in certain inside instances (where my fps usually would max out well over 60fps)

They really need some help optimizing and streamlining preformance.

AOC would be a nice game if it wasn't for all tha issues. It's like that hot girl you were thinking of dating that has a ton of baggage.

This is trying to put Lip-stick on a pig, graphic card is great game is not.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

When you can scale the game with a 2 miles view distance and graphical settings not available in any other mmo, of course performance will dip when everything is turned on.

Scales well at the high end and the low end is a true statement from the development cycle.

Remember all those arguments that ATI cards were no good for AoC? well things look a little differently now.

I am sure most mmorpg players play on 22" monitors or less (with more playing on less in size) therefore performance will be far superior to the 20 " stats displayed here.

 

You wont see any other mmorpg with a view distance of 2 miles where you can turn everything up at 30" res and see better frame rates. Thats right. Because no other mmorpg lets you have the options too.

Its a demanding game on hardware, no denying that, but its also in a graphical option area where other mmorpg aspire to have options like that.

Im sorry AA, but AOC graphical engine is not some amazing piece of code.DreamWorld is a horrible engine, has been since AO and still is today. The entire engine is slapstick.

The graphical settings are on par with many MMOs out to date. Hell, Vanguard has a larger view distance. Settings mean nothing really when they scale like ass. 2 mile view distance is kinda pointless anyway unless you can see another player clearly from said distance, which you cant. I would rather a less graphically demanding game if it meant I could travel across the world without the help of teleport NPCs and not having to worry about which instance of the zone my friends happen to be in.

Originally posted by Jadar

Does anyone else find those numbers depressing? I mean, to play this game at max quality, at an acceptable framerate (60+ fps), means playing at 1680 resolution or lower or buying triple/quad graphics card setups. That is so over the top for an MMO. I guess there is a sort of future proofing to it, if the game has a future.

And what happens when they release the DX10 client? Will they release the DX10 client?

what are you talking about? when WoW came out, I couldnt run it on high game resolution with high game settings, and my computer was pretty good when WoW came out, and WoW is universally accepted as one of the weakest 3d mmo's graphically, probably ever.

The computer I can run a 4 year old low graphic quality game on high settings(WoW), can run a brand new cutting-edge high graphic quality game (AoC) on low/medium settings with the same framerates on both games.

If I find a computer that can run wow at 60+ fps on full max settings, I'm pretty sure it can run AoC at 60+ fps on medium, atleast that's the trend my comps showed. 4 year difference, insane quality difference.

I guess that leaves the bare-bones. This arguement ultimately comes down to whether or not an MMO and a SinglePlayer game should mix their 'advancement' areas (ie. singleplayer games push new graphics, mmo games push 'its good for an mmo' graphics) Personally I don't see a problem with an MMO going balls to the walls with graphics (and possibly lacking content) and vice versa for single player games making crappy graphics (and possibly having immense content.) It is obviously not common practice for an MMO to have insane graphics, and a single player game to be incredibly content detailed, but when almost everything else on the market is the same as the box next to it, it's nice to see somebody trying something new.

Oblivion was the first game to really ignite the next big push into a whole other level of graphic quality, when that game came out, my buddy went to fry's and dropped a bit under $2k on just a motherboard, chip, ram, and video card, already having next to the best in the rest if i remember right, came home to play oblivion on a now standard 22"-23" monitor, and was shocked to find that with the brand newest stuff, he couldnt run it on max over 20-30 in enclosed areas, and high at 50-75, that is if i remember right, lol take those frame rates are garbage filler, but you get my point. I guess even after saying that, it all goes back to the paragraph directly above.

--------------------

as to the main thread itself, I noticed at the highest resolution, the HD4870x2 had the best framerate, it's nice to see ATI planning ahead, even if I won't run at 2560xAnything resolution for a while.

Nvidia has some nice stuff *i have an nvidia card* but I have to say, between market cornering tactics of microsoft and nvidia in the '90s, I have a hard time Not comparing ATI to 3dfx, and it's because of that comparison that if I had to choose between ATI and Nvidia for a corporate takeover monopoly of domination, I would pick ATI to be king of the mountain.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

You wont see any other mmorpg with a view distance of 2 miles where you can turn everything up at 30" res and see better frame rates. Thats right. Because no other mmorpg lets you have the options too.

Its a demanding game on hardware, no denying that, but its also in a graphical option area where other mmorpg aspire to have options like that.

Like I said and still waiting for any proof if there is any.  pIctures with nice view distances do not correlate performance and quality at 30" res.

At 30" res, there is no other mmorpg out there that has better frame rates with all the same options as AoC has turned on and can get the same FPS. Any other mmorpg lets you put an "in-game option for transparency AA" at the draw distances AoC offers?

You haters are a bit slow in getting my point, the performance here is with Everything turned on. Transparency options are not available in other mmorpg's at that distance giving a better performance at higher resolutions because they dont offer that feature. Thats why respectable sites like the one in the forst post use AoC as a Bench because it stress' hardware when used. That is an option to use those highest settings.

Remember before the game came out - they said it would push the newest machines but still could be toned down to be played on older machines -still true.

As for the mis-informed guy about SLI - I have one machine with 8800GT in I added another and my FPS increased by about 70%. I have another with a 9800Gx2 which gets just below that at 19x12.

Guess what I can see people 2 miles away, rendered nicely too.

Its not about how far any game can let you view, its about how well it looks over that distance and performs.

Some of you are mis-understanding my point.

here is some more relevant stats done:

what do you think in comparison? enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

(DirectX 9)

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a very new game. This MMORGP is very graphically advanced for this style of gameplay, and we’ve seen it bring current video cards to their knees when trying to maximize the in-game graphics options. This game is also rather popular with gamers, and this evaluation wouldn’t be complete without including this new game. Unfortunately it is so new, that we were unable to do our regular highest-playable run-throughs in Age of Conan in time for this launch.

Age of Conan can be a pain as far as testing goes, because the time of day changes in AoC in-game. The game will cycle from day to night, and the different lighting being used can affect performance differently. In order to find the highest playable settings we must test in the day time, the evening time, the night time, and at dawn. When we do a run-through we also must make sure it is done at the same time of day on all video cards being compared. This adds a time factor to testing with AoC, making evaluating with it take much longer. We’ve found out that in 1 hour of real-time 6 hours of game-time passes by. So in a 4 hour period the game will completely cycle a 24 hour day. Keep this in mind as you are playing, because performance will change between day and night, and our evaluation reflects a level of gameplay that works in all times of day in the game.

First we are going to show you a table outlining the highest playable settings we found. Then we will follow below with an apples-to-apples comparison at 2560x1600 with highest in-game settings.

Age of Conan contains many graphical options in-game. We are not going to explore them all in this evaluation. For a complete overview of what the settings are and what they do, and for more detailed AoC evaluation please check out our Age of Conan Gameplay Performance and IQ evaluation.

Highest Playable – 1920x1200

Here we go folks; this is what the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is capable of. Age of Conan is simply breathtaking on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 and 4870 X2 CrossFireX platforms. One of the features the new ATI Radeon HD 4800 series supports is called Custom Filtering AA, talked about on this page. Custom Filtering AA (CFAA) is a method employed by the Radeon HD 4800 series to improve antialiasing image quality by using an edge detect algorithm. The beauty of this technology is that uses the stream processors to perform this action and does not tax the framebuffer at all. That means you can get high quality AA (equivalent of 12X and 24X AA) without the cost of using up memory bandwidth and capacity, it uses the shaders. The downside of course is when you are in a shader intensive game you can’t exactly spare the shader horsepower. But, with a setup like Radeon HD 4870 X2 with 4-GPUs powering the game, it has a ton of shader horsepower, 3200 stream processors at your disposal! In that vein, we of course had to test it!

As you can see in Age of Conan at 1920x1200 we were able to run with the highest in-game settings enabled, this means highest shadows, highest view distances and bloom enabled. Not only that, but we were able to use the unique edge detect custom filtering AA option of 12X, and not just that folks, but also Adaptive AA! This means we are receiving the quality of 12X AA on all polygon edges, as well as using Adaptive AA to reduce aliasing on all alpha textures (foliage) in the game! This is just with the single Radeon HD 4870 X2 as well. In order to use CFAA one only needs to select “Edge Detect” in the control panel and then set the in-game AA option to 4X. At 4X MSAA you receive 12X CFAA. At 8X MSAA you receive 24X CFAA.

As you can see, moving up to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX configuration we are now able to set the absolute highest AA setting possible here, 24X CFAA WITH Adaptive AA! Yes, 24X CFAA with Adaptive AA, and getting an average framerate of 51 FPS. Holy cow, what else is there to say really? It blows the doors off of the GTX 280.

The BFGTech GeForce GTX 280 OC was playable with 8xQ AA (true 8X MSAA), but was not playable with transparency antialiasing at this level. Therefore the Radeon HD 4870 X2 allows a higher gameplay experience by giving us 12X AA plus Adaptive AA to reduce aliasing on foliage.

The GeForce GTX 280 SLI platform allowed us to enable transparency supersampling, but at 4X. We could alternatively disable transparency supersampling and run at a higher AA level, but we like our foliage all antialiased in the game. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 however surpassed the GTX 280 SLI configuration by allowing a higher AA setting of 24X AA plus Adaptive AA enabled.

Highest Playable – 2560x1600

Things only get more exciting at 2560x1600 for these video cards. We are just flat out floored, with drool everywhere, at the level of immersion these platforms allow at 2560x1600 in Age of Conan. No joke, we found 8X AA playable on both, but the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX platform still comes out the winner here. With GeForce GTX 280 SLI we were able to play at true 8X MSAA at 2560x1600 with the highest in-game settings, very impressive indeed. However, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX platform surpassed that by allowing us to enable Adaptive AA plus 8X AA to reduce aliasing on all the foliage in the game as well! Not only that, but as you can see, the performance is still even higher than GTX 280 SLI at these higher settings. Just simply outstanding!

Due to this incredible level of AA performance out of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 we had to run some apples-to-apples tests to take a further look at it, including scaling. The next few pages go a little deeper into these fantastic performance experiences. (see link at top for more games and performance)

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The bit in green is what im getting at.

What do these cards benchmark at during the 48vs48 sieges? Oh wait, they promised those at launch but didnt deliver did they....

Originally posted by Arcken

What do these cards benchmark at during the 48vs48 sieges? Oh wait, they promised those at launch but didnt deliver did they....

urrm about 20 fps for me on average in the thick of it.  You?

Wait... had to build city up first!

Wait there was a bug that prevented some guilds getting there about 9 days before they could, big whoop!

Great so to be able to play aoc with decent fps I need to get myself a 6000$ comp, a game that costs 50$ and pay 15$ a month. Now that a good deal for a broken game with not much content, worst support (might be tied with $OE's).

That sounds like something  very interesting, ty FC for making a great game that will cost you as much as a car if you want to play it decently.

Actually if I was to buy such a comp, running 3D mark would be more fun to watch than playing aoc.

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Originally posted by bachanam

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Originally posted by Jadar

Does anyone else find those numbers depressing? I mean, to play this game at max quality, at an acceptable framerate (60+ fps), means playing at 1680 resolution or lower or buying triple/quad graphics card setups. That is so over the top for an MMO. I guess there is a sort of future proofing to it, if the game has a future.
And what happens when they release the DX10 client? Will they release the DX10 client?

---

 

what are you talking about? when WoW came out, I couldnt run it on high game resolution with high game settings, and my computer was pretty good when WoW came out, and WoW is universally accepted as one of the weakest 3d mmo's graphically, probably ever.

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The NVidia 6800 series and the ATI X800 series were released a good 6 months prior to the release of WoW and both could give frame rates at max settings well over 60fps (around 75 fps). Even some of the 6600 cards could top 60fps at the lower resolutions. What's more, these cards would maintain playable frame rates even when raiding.

Ahh...ignorance. Got to love the smell of it.

First, the 4870 comes in at around $299, so it is hardly an expensive component. Secondly, where are you getting the idea that you need a $6000 computer? You could easily get a rig to run like this sub-$1500 (and probably sub-$1000 if you use your old parts), if you know how to build up a computer yourself, which isn't really that hard.

Solareus, not sure what you're talking about, but I would like you to think about one thing. The people on these forums play MMO's and don't know a lot about computers. I remember a review on this site that said the BigNetwork KillerNIC was a better upgrade than a new cpu or video card. Yeah...can't bullshit anyone around here.

Right now, the 4870 is the undisputed king of graphics cards, coming in at performance above the 9800, which actually uses the same chipset as the  8800 G92 core cards, as well as being cheaper, which makes it far more attractive. You may argue this as much as you likie, but the numbers don't lie as far as real world performance. Surf around the web and you'll see the same thing on other sites who did their own testing.

I wonder if all the people who quit because "their FPS dropped" realized that funcom turned off by default multi core support, and you now have to press ctrl+alt+c (just once) to re-enable it and get your FPS back?

On my 8800 GTS my fps almost never drops below 30 and is usually in the 50-60 range (capped at 60 due to vsync). This is at 1680*1050, High, shadows off, AA at 2x, AF at 8x, bloom off.

Originally posted by Annekynn

I wonder if all the people who quit because "their FPS dropped" realized that funcom turned off by default multi core support, and you now have to press ctrl+alt+c (just once) to re-enable it and get your FPS back?

On my 8800 GTS my fps almost never drops below 30 and is usually in the 50-60 range (capped at 60 due to vsync). This is at 1680*1050, High, shadows off, AA at 2x, AF at 8x, bloom off.

now.. why would you turn off multi core support on default. on the back of the box it says... oh wait.

Originally posted by twhint

Ahh...ignorance. Got to love the smell of it.

 

First, the 4870 comes in at around $299, so it is hardly an expensive component.

The 4870 X2 used in these tests has not been released yet. It will contain 2 4870 chips on the same board. I doubt it will sell for $299. The GTX 280 sells for $499 and up

Secondly, where are you getting the idea that you need a $6000 computer? You could easily get a rig to run like this sub-$1500 (and probably sub-$1000 if you use your old parts), if you know how to build up a computer yourself, which isn't really that hard.

Those tests were performed with high end computers. The Anandtech used a Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 CPU which sells for 1499 at Newegg, the [H]Enthisiast used a QX9650 which sells for $1020 at Newegg. Those are just the CPU's. Add in motherboards, memory, HD's, video cards, PSU's and video cards and you are looking at a build price of 3 to 4K. Off the shelf prebuilts you could double those prices.

Solareus, not sure what you're talking about, but I would like you to think about one thing. The people on these forums play MMO's and don't know a lot about computers. I remember a review on this site that said the BigNetwork KillerNIC was a better upgrade than a new cpu or video card. Yeah...can't bullshit anyone around here.

So why are you trying to bullshit people that these are low end computers ?

Right now, the 4870 is the undisputed king of graphics cards, coming in at performance above the 9800, which actually uses the same chipset as the  8800 G92 core cards, as well as being cheaper, which makes it far more attractive. You may argue this as much as you likie, but the numbers don't lie as far as real world performance. Surf around the web and you'll see the same thing on other sites who did their own testing.

The Anandtech test using a single 4870 got the following framerates 1680 x 1050 36 FPS, 1920 x 1200 32 FPS, and 2560 x 1600 25FPS. This was with that card in a machine where the CPU alone cost more than my entire computer. Not exactly anything to brag about in my opinion.