Well I have been waiting for WAR after another bad release and dissapointment, (not mentioning any names) and decided to make a froob account and enjoy a little AO.

Sad to say, AO seems to be suffering from Funcom's other woes.

While I have a fairly new machine I still get only between 5-13 fps in outside zones. (In missions I get 60-90 fps but still suffer from lag spikes lasting up to minutes in length).

I am constantly getting lag, lag, lag, and disconnected. It will be fine for a few days and then a few days Its dc after dc after dc. On these days the game is unplayable.

I dunno, seems like Funcom has abandoned this game and doesn't properly maintain the servers anymore.

The disconnects and most of the lag is due to savvis.net, the ISP Funcom uses. They have provided shitty service from the first day of AO, but Funcom refuses to switch ISPs despite overwhelming complaints from the community for years.

Works fine for me most of the time, had plenty of lag spikes and such in WoW to for that matter.

As for graphics i have an nvidia 8800gtx but perfomance is not that hot but that is mostly thanks to old engine and using dx7, most if not all the work is done by the cpu not the gpu, if they get the new dx9 engine in soon it might be very different.

And well the game is still fun :)

Isnt the graphical update a simple recompile??

The FPS problem is due to the graphic engine (old engine) that actually does not use your graphic card, but your processor.

The engine update should solve this problem and make the game more fluent.

Regarding the lag... heh... sometimes working some other time it doesn't. And yes, it's due to Savvis most of the time.

i used to expect  a lot of  lag when the  athen  got invaded but not now as there is no one about. yet seems to be worst in some  places

Lag in AO mostly comes from the DX7 engine and the way the game relies on heavy disk usage.  New engine coming down the line should get rid of most of those issues.  The other lag issues may be related to Savvis but they appear to be on the way out as well, from what the Game Director has said recently.  AO has been running on a server farm Funcom put together in 2007 as a prototype for the AoC server farm and it appears that when AoC does it's server merge in December, AO will migrate to fill some of that space, and almost certainly move to the AoC hosting provider and ditch Savvis altogether.