Sandra Prior

Get a Smoother Conan

Get brutal with Age of Conan's settings and stop it bringing your PC to its knees.

Apart from visually resplendent Crysis, until Age of Conan: Hyborion Adventures, there  were few games that made the most of the latest hardware. With truly beautiful vistas awaiting those that visit Hyboria, there's finally a reason to splash some serious cash on your computer.

But you needn't necessarily upgrade to play the game. With a little tweaking there's a large swathe of PCs that can enjoy the wonders of this online world: play with the three performance options to get the game running on your rig. Most will be unimpressed with the 'Low' quality setting, as it reduces a fine-looking game into a fairly mediocre one. The solution is to get your hands dirty, and get in the advanced settings screens to define exactly what effects should be used, and how far you should render into the distance.

As ever with a new game, check your graphics drivers before you start experimenting -just to make sure that you've got a good start point for your graphics tweaking. Age of Conan is a big game, and that can lead to some serious file fragmentation, particularly after a big patch. Which is why you should run that old reliable, Disk Defragmenter now and again to help speed things along.

Benchmarking Conan

As with any form of system tweaking, you need a starting point that you can use to compare your tweaking against. The easiest way of doing this is to use your Path of Asura ability to return to your main home and don't move your character. Hit [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [F] to pop the frame rate counter onto the top left hand corner of your screen, so you can easily see what your current frame rate is. Hitting this combo again will hide it.
 
Extreme solutions

Hit Escape to go to the main menu, then click on the Video Options option. The Overall Quality buttons are extreme solutions; reducing display resolution has the biggest affect on performance, but stick to the native resolution of your screen if you can. The overall View distance option improves frame rates a lot, but at the cost of loveliness - so be careful. Enabling bloom makes game look beautiful, but you'll need a quality rig to enjoy it at anything above slideshow speeds.
 
The Advanced tab

If you've got an older card, selecting a 2x shader model can work wonders. Further down, in Water reflections, dropping down to 'reflect from ground only" should net you around five frames, while getting rid of reflections entirely will add another five. Disabling the rendering of grass can help too, but many have found that leaving this on and reducing draw distance works better. Playing with Shadow Quality can also help things.

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