Every now and then there's a game that takes the PC gaming community by storm coming out of nowhere to rack up huge sales numbers in what people have been calling a dead market since the days of the PlayStation One and Nintendo 64. The one this year is Age of Conan, the MMORPG from Funcom, which has sold 500,00 copies since it's release to June 1st with undoubtedly many more sold since then. The company was best known for Anarchy Online and clearly have struck MMORPG gold with Age of Conan.

Age of Conan runs off the Dreamworld graphics engine which Funcom originally developed in 2000 for Anarchy Online. Funcom decided with Age of Conan to try and take this further and develop the engine more so to bring it up to date for gameplay, graphics, and more. This includes such things as Cheetah, their own renderer used to apply shadows to everything in game, SpeedTree which works on creating better quality graphics for foliage, and in the future Funcom plans to support Microsoft's DirectX 10 API. Currently Age of Conan only uses Microsoft's DirectX 9 so we'll be looking at that in our performance testing. Consensus all around though is that Age of Conan is a top tier MMORPG with a very advanced graphics engine so it's something we definitely wanted to benchmark.

We used FRAPS through a 40 second run through the game in an area without any other variables to adjust the frames per second. Here is our start position and then end.

Here is our test system.

ATI Catalyst 8.6 and nForce 159.17 drivers were used on Vista Ultimate SP1.

Start:

End:

Here are our graphic settings for the game.

As you can see we ran at fairly high quality settings.

Now onto the benchmark results.