Age Of Conan System Requirements

Posted by Compuman 04/07/2008 10:49 pm

Well forced upgrades are always a downside to gaming however my take on this is that most "gamers" out there already have a system in place that will at least meet the minimum specs and most likely meet the recommended ones as well.
I have been a gamer most of my life and my current system is sitting well above the recommended specs. I actual prefer a company to make a decent game and require computer upgrades than to make a less decent game that will run okay with lower quality machines. I find it keeps the morons and the kids out and leaves a more mature audience.
And lets face it, even the recommended specs for AoC are not that bad. I current am running two sli GeForce 8800 GTS 512 cards in my rig along with a Sharp Aquos 46" 1080p lcd monitor, 4 gigs of ram, some amd x2 64 dual core cpu and a dual set of raid stripping drives and I was thinking of upgrading soon.
Long story short, as long as you stay around one generation back from a hardware point of view there is not a game in the world you can not play and the cost for staying one generation back is not very high at all. Every two years swap out a mobo, ram and cpu, every 3 or 4 years upgrade the drives to the fastest connection available, every 5 or 6 years upgrade the Video and everything should run smooth no matter what game you yearn to play.
I used to follow that rule of thumb and had no trouble playing the latest and greatest game with just a few settings turned down here and there.
For myself now I tend to replace all the parts every two years as the technology leapfrogs but only because I can and because I enjoy playing the games running full speed and full spec.
In the end my belief is that gaming is the leading cause of this computer age, we are the ones that the hardware is being designed for, pushing the limits, driving the sales etc so let them pump out games that need system upgrades so that the whol industry keeps going and I can look forward to upgrading to a shiny new 4gb video card in two years :)

Posted by KodrutZ 04/08/2008 12:03 am

You are absolutely right, but you also must agree that MMORPGs and online games, in most cases, also try to aim at the emerging markets, and there are a lot of people out there that really can't afford a rig like yours(I was reading somewhere one of these days that over half of the STEAM users are still running Radeon 9600 cards...).

At last, there should also be considered one fact - optimizations! With today's hardware, decently optimized games should run perfectly, and not require upgrades just for the sake of having a DX 10 card, DDR3, quad-core CPU, and so on.

Look at Call of Duty 4, for example, or Unreal Tournament 3 - two games that look simply amazing, and run great on mid-range configurations with settings pushed to the max (I have a Radeon X1950 Pro/X2 4000+@2.4GHz/2X1DDR2@800MHz/4-4-4-11CR2, and both ran perfectly@1280X1024).

Jul 11, 2008: Age Of Conan Digital Download