Hey all,

I've been giving this game a shot but I get awful, awful performance. I average about 7 fps.

I tried every one of the display drivers in the settings to no avail.

System:

Intel Q6600 quadcore @ 3.2 ghz

GPU: xfx 8800 gts extreme edition

RAM: 4 gigs

Vista 64 bit Home Premium

PSU: 650 watts

Any suggestions or links to fixes? The game is pretty unplayable, unfortunately, a lot of the time. Everything is slow and/or delayed because I get awful rendering performance.

The reason why your getting such crap FPS is the engine is based on dx8 could be dx7 but its one of those two.  I got pretty good frame rates on my 3ghz P4 a gig of ram and a x800gto.  Once the new game engine is used you will get a lot better FPS.    It should be out sometime this year last time I check, but that was months ago.

The newer the graphics card, the worse the performance, in many cases.  The graphics card makers are dropping DX7 support from their drivers and that slows AO.  AO doesn't use graphics card processors for much of anything.  PC's made in 2001 can often crank at 30-40 fps because their hardware runs drivers tuned to what AO uses.  When the new graphics engine comes out later this year, that should all change, as it will be fully DX9 compatible and make good use of the rendering engines in modern graphics cards.

Thanks for taking the time to give me a constructive response.

Those are the conclusions I came to (new vs old systems, drivers, etc) but was not positive. I was hoping it was something else! Ah well. I could see the amazing potential and depth in the game, I WILL play it when the new graphics engine comes out. That should fix things (I HOPE) so I can run it on my system.

Man, it was so bad...it was the worst handling I've seen in any gamein my life. 3-5 FPS and just running like molasses/jolty/jumpy, everything was total crap. Hahaha...the new graphics engine overhaul will be great.

I'm bumping this old thread for a point of reference for people looking at the game.

I don't know what changed, but I went back and got the game to run very well on the same hardware on the same system. I am suspecting either a new driver or a new patch made it work on my system. The same tactic I tried the first time that failed worked this time for making the game run.

Either way, if you're looking through old posts, don't let this scare you off. With a little adjustment you can probably get it to work.

The game is pretty CPU bound and video card muscle does little for it.