Minimum Requirements Testing


Age of Conan’s rock bottom, bare minimum requirements run even higher than most office PC’s or people second computers. Users who have not upgraded for a couple years are finding themselves shutout from the game due to incredibly poor quality with almost anything that predates a 2006 PC. We wanted to find out exactly how accurate the minimum requirements were, and exactly what kind of experience users who met these requirements would have. We matched the specs almost perfectly, but were forced to use 1GB of DDR2-533MHz ram as our motherboard did not support DDR1.

Minimum Configuration (1024X768, detail reduced)
OS: Windows XP SP2
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3GHz or equivalent
RAM: Samsung 1GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 128MB
DVD-Rom: Quad-speed (4x) DVD-Rom Drive
Hard Drive Space: 32GB

Graphical Settings:
Resolution: 1024X768
Quality Settings: Low Preset


Using our lowest preset and lowest available resolution, the game play on Tortage beach: the very start of the game, did not bode well at all. Not once did it peak over the minimum playable 30 FPS and with an average of 19.4 frames per second it was not at all enjoyable to play.


As expected Tarantia fares even worse, with frames becoming like a slideshow in most areas.

Safe to say that even at its lowest point Age of Conan is not meant to be run on an aging PC and looking at the screenshots, who would want to anyways. The graphics of the game are half the fun. In fact, given the results, we suspect that even many relatively newer laptops will struggle to run at low settings.

We realized after, that the "detail reduced" description really wasn’t descriptive as to exactly what that entailed. We assumed it denoted the preset low settings, however there was room to take it down a bit further so we did.

We dropped the visuals from the low preset (left photo) to the lowest possible custom settings (right photo)


And the performance looked like this -


Even with everything a gigantic blob, the system was still unable to pull off passing frames. Given that it really couldn’t have taken that much graphics power to display our blob, one has to attribute the dismal numbers to the fact that the AI and detail requirements just could not be handled by a lowly single core processor and 1GB of ram.