Friday, March 27, 2009

Age of Conan - DX10 Not so official

Well, as of Wednesday, DX10 test client was launched to the live servers. I think you can guess how this has been so far.
Luckily the game is stable and running.
The DX10 client is a separate piece installed in the main folder, and must be forced in the simpleconfig tool to even work...also a good sign.
But, so far, for myself, I am not able to run it due to two reasons,

My right mouse button loses control and the character looks at the sky if trying to say rotate or look around. After this, I cannot look forward anymore.
Certain resolutions are not selectable. I play on a 42" LCD, thus from the couch I need a certain resolution ..1360x768 (720p for LCD), or I could even get by with 1440x900. Nothing below 1600 is playable.

Right now, the tech forums is of course full of issues, and other reports of framerates being halved or even cut to a 3rd of normal.

This was suppose to have launched a year ago?

Now I wish it had never been mentioned.

I am, at this point, leery of DX10 working for ANY MMO due to the horsepower involved. The only two other games using DX10 ..LOTRO and EvE do not use 100% compliant DX10, thus cheating the system to run (for example, LOTRO works thanks to NO DX10 features on the models, which makes perfect sense...and yes, don't yell at me because I paid a minor compliment to LOTRO.)

It was a good move to bring DX10 to live for testing purposes, but at the same point it is just another bullet in the hate-war against Funcom, as I still read "They can't even get that right" (not taking into account NO ONE HAS gotten it right).

I think if anything this will be a true test for some upcoming hardware, and who knows...maybe even a selling point. Both ATI and Nvidia have some new monster chips coming...as well as Intel (who I never count in graphics battles, but supposedly has a secret weapon this time...), which all could run this new client like a dream.

For now, I will still stick with the best looking DX9 MMO around.

Cheers

3 comments:

Gamer Hudson said...

I thought I had it running and used the config tool until I got in game and looked at my options and it was still set to DX9. Odd.

Oh well whatever. Still looks awesome not like we are missing much.

Doc said...

Well, after I win the fight to get Crysis to work I was going to get the DX10 patch for AoC and actually log in for once this year.

Thanks for the heads up.

-Doc McBruce

Anonymous said...

I tried the DX10 option and there was a definite difference in how it looked, but also in performance.

So I switched back to DX9 after a while.