All the Bangs and Whistles

We couldn’t finish off this review without showing you just how gorgeous the Age of Conan scenery looks, and exactly what kind of system power you need to reach maximum potential.

The test system was the review’s best performer, which never once failed us and allowed completely seamless graphics throughout.

OS: Windows Vista SP1 x64
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz
Video Card: nVidia 9800GTX 512MB
RAM: OCZ REAPER PC2-8500 DDR2 4GB

Turning on and up every option possible we left no setting unchecked.


Even using today’s best single GPU video card solution we were unable to pull off passing frames. It came close, but frequent dips during large fight scenes pulled the card to below acceptable results. Even if it was not entirely smooth, the graphics were something to behold. Looking like something out of a brochure for a tropical getaway (aside from the rotting corpse), walking around and enjoying the scenery was almost more fun than actually playing the game. Though, once you move out of Tortage, many areas have a barren, rocky wasteland theme which makes the journey a little drab.


Given that the beach couldn’t quite pull it off, Tarantia wasn’t much of a surprise.

Again it performed well for the most part, and while playable in certain areas, the computer’s struggle was evident.



While boasting some of the best graphics of an MMORPG - and dare say any game on the current market - it is unfortunate that for most users, graphics such as these will be simply unobtainable. Given that at this time, the next step up to our video card is nearly double in the price and a better CPU is roughly a third of the cost more, views of this magnitude will only be for those with very deep pockets. For those with similar setups to our high end test bed, some concessions can be made to our maxed out settings and one should be able to achieve above par frames with very similar visuals.