LOTRO System Requirements |
| Written by Dave Taylor | |||
| Thursday, 24 May 2007 | |||
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I thought it would be worth talking about my experiences with LOTRO on various spec PCs. The minimum PC specifications for LOTRO on the box are P4 1.8Ghz or Athlon XP 1800, 512Mb RAM, 7Gb disk space, DirectX 9.0c, DVD (2x), broadband and a one of the supported 64Mb graphics cards. The recommended specs on the box are P4 3Ghz or Athlon 64, 1Gb RAM, 10Gb disk space, DVD (2x), broadband and a supported video card with 128Mbs.
Just for completist's sake, before I talk about what the game runs like on these systems, the supported graphics cards listed for LOTRO are ATi Radeon 8ccc, 9000, 9200, 9500, 9550, 9600, 9700, 9800, x700, x800, x850, x1300, x1600, x1800, x1900, x1950 and nVidia GeForce 3, GeForce 4 (not MX), GeForce FX 5200, 5600, 5700, 5800, 5900, 5950, 6800, 7100, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950, 8800.
OK, so first of all I installed the game on my high end desktop PC, which is an Intel Core 2 6600 (2 x 2.4Ghz), GeForce 8800 GTS, 2GB RAM and Windows Vista (sigh). Now, you will note that this system has the very highest graphics card supported by the game, because it is the latest one released at the time of launch, and pretty much at the time of writing. OK, it's the GTS, not the GTX, but even so, we are talking a serious card. By default the game did not turn all the graphics up to full. It has them set pretty high, but some textures and anti-aliasing options were disabled. The game played fine and looked great, but having this system, I had to see what it was like with the graphics turned up to eleven, so I did this manually. Firstly, the difference in the graphics is nice, but not essential. What got me though, was that there is now a noticeable jerkiness in the graphics when I run around. Given that this is the best card on the market, I fail to see how it cannot handle the game at the highest possible specs. For the time being I have left the graphics turned up on this PC beacuse it's nice to have them, but I feel gutted that even this PC doesn't seem fully up to the task. Having seen lots of reports that Vista causes a 10-15% performance hit on graphics, I have to wonder whether it is Vista rather than the game or the card. Here's hoping some new drivers will improve the performance. The only other thing I noted was that the game chewed up the 2Gb of RAM in the PC, which means I have to consider adding another 2Gb to see if that improves things. 4Gb RAM to play a game seems excessive. Now to a lower spec PC. I also installed the game on several laptops, the lowest of which is an Acer Aspire 1694 - Pentium M 760 2Ghz, ATi MObility Radeon x700 with 128Mb and 1Gb RAM. The game defaulted to its low graphics settings, which means you lose a lot of textures and details, but to be honest, the game still looks very nice and when you are playing, you hardly remember. It ran perfectly. The conclusions you can draw about the system requirements for Lord of the Rings Online is that the game does scale wonderfully. From low end to high end, it will run smoothly if you set the graphics to match the system, which the game will automatically do on initial setup, but you can tweak from the Options menu. If, however, you want to run LOTRO with every graphic option at maximum, then you are going to need a very high spec machine, much higher than recommended spec with over 2Gb RAM and the best graphics card on the market. Ouch.
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Steve
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| Just a quick FYI, _Vista_ steals up to 1.5gb of ram by itself (depending how much you have to start with), compared to XP's much more reasonable 300mb or so. 4gb to run a game in Vista is not excessive. For XP its overkill but not Vista... Also the GTS is a decent card, but I _do_ run on Ultra settings and at ultra high resolution (2048 x 1536)... (everywhere but the ettenmoors/helegrod in large raids) using a 512mb 7900GTX, same processor and ram as you with XP pro. Vista vs XP is a big difference. Your mileage will vary. |
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