Please report: Age of Conan on iMac 8800 GS

[meta]

I've ordered a 24-inch 3.06GHz iMac with 4GB RAM and the 8800GS. The reason for me upgrading now is Age of Conan.

Can you please report your experiences with AoC on the 8800GS? Specifically:

• What graphics settings did you settle on?
• What FPS do you get on average with those settings?
• Did you try to upgrade the GS's drivers beyond what Apple provided in Boot Camp?
• Which operating system (XP or Vista) did you find gave you better performance?
• Have you experienced any glitches or crashes? If so, how did you fix them?

I'm really only interested in hearing from those with a similar spec regarding AoC. Thanks for your answers!

 

[meta]

To sort of answer my own question (and to help others trying to find the answer), I've read elsewhere that...

Age of Conan ran at about 50fps with settings on max except shadows, which I disabled, character shadows look like crap in the game, and setting it to everything eats your fps, antialiasing at 8xq, resolution at highest ofc, so pretty nice, that was without sp 1 tho, hoping with that new sp included i'll get better videodrivers to keep the game from running out of bloody memory.
There's a thread on it at the Conan forums with a LOT of ppl using nvidia grafx cards on any system, saying they all got the same problem, just wait and bleed till funcom fixes it i take it
Think all top notched imacs will run every latest game at very decent speed at very decent settings, 512mb vram is quite the standard now, let's just hope either apple or nvidia are comin up with updated drivers for the stuff!

So, a mix of bad and good. Would anyone else like to chime in on their experiences with AoC on the iMac with the 8800 GS?

 

[meta]

Regarding the above-mentioned issues:

Updated all my stuff, meaning windows vista, and bootcamp,
textures look stunning, game(Age of Conan) runs at about 50fps, quite constant, and haven't had a single crash since i'm up to date with all of my drivers.

So the bad isn't so bad after all. Anyone else have anything to add?

 

[meta]

Now that I've received my iMac, installed Vista (Home Basic, updated to SP1), and got AoC installed, I can report on my findings:

With settings set to High (except shadows, which are all turned off) I regularly get around 45-50 FPS in outside areas. In Tortage I get around 35-40, although I occasionally dip below 30 FPS. So far I've experienced no crashes, freezes, or hiccups of any kind.

Very impressed it handles this game so well! Note: make sure you get the Boot Camp 2.1 driver update, as before that I had no sound in Vista.

 

[macboots]

hello mate. let me ask you, are you using shader 3.0 or 2.0? i'm playing AoC on high with 2x AA, shadows form char only on low res, every draw option set all the way to the right, everyother single setting set to high (no bloom) and i'm between 40-75 fps, average on 50.

now, all this is possible beacuse i'm using shader 2.0, not 3.0. i have same mac as you except for the 4gb of ram and using windows xp, might switch to vista 32bits.

shader 3.0 gives lots of eyecandy, but 2.0 its not that bad and the mac can handle it with evrything maxed and als antialasing. thanks for yourfeedback, cheers!