Is Age of Empires 4 a demanding game?
As an enthusiastic Age of Empires player for over 15 years and content creator focusing on real-time strategy gaming, this question has come across my desk many times since Age of Empires 4 launched.
So let‘s dive in and breakdown why AOE4 has steeper demands compared to most RTS games and where it stands performance-wise as we enter 2023.
How Age of Empires 4 System Requirements Compare to Previous Titles
Right off the bat, the recently released minimum and recommended system requirements give us hints that Age of Empires 4 will demand more GPU power, CPU horsepower, memory capacity, and faster storage compared to earlier Age games:
| Version | Release Year | Minimum GPU | Recommended GPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| AOE 1 DE | 2019 | Intel HD 4400 | N/A |
| AOE 2 DE | 2019 | Nvidia GT 420 | GeForce 9800 GT |
| AOE 3 DE | 2020 | AMD Radeon HD 5770 | Radeon R9 290 / GTX 970 |
| AOE 4 | 2021 | Intel HD 520 | GeForce 970 / Radeon RX 570 |
You can see with each Edition, the GPU demands stepped up significantly – with AOE 4 recommended GPUs being modern mid-range to higher-end graphics cards. This pattern continues when comparing CPU and storage components across the versions as well.
Clearly Microsoft and Relic Entertainment built AOE4 to tap into modern gaming horsepower based on its visuals alone!
AOE4 Game Engine Enhancements Drive Up System Requirements
Under the hood, Age of Empires 4 utilizes Relic‘s proprietary Essence Engine, now in its 5th iteration, which includes significant graphical upgrades such as:
- – Enhanced textures & polygon counts on environments/assets
- – Realistic water physics with ripple effects
- – Ray traced global illumination shadowing
- – Volumetric fire, smoke, weather effects
- – Destructible buildings with advanced physics
Previous Age of Empires editions simply couldn‘t render graphics at this level of fidelity. The Essence Engine 5 also adds support for multi-core CPUs and modern GPU architectures to distribute demands – which old versions couldn‘t leverage appropriately.
Make no mistake though, all these visual enhancements directly drive up the baseline compute, memory, and pixel pushing requirements compared to earlier RTS titles!
Smooth Late-Game Performance Requires CPU Horsepower
While graphics explain the enhanced GPU needs, late-game scenarios that spawn hundreds of units piles on the CPU requirements for AOE4 significantly:
- – More entities for the physics engine to track
- – Greater coordinate and pathfinding calculations
- – Additional textures to render at CPU level
- – More particle effects to simulate (arrows, weather)
- – Increased database lookups for assets/metadata
All this adds up quickly! Not to mention background OS processes competing for resources. Hence my recommendation of 16 GB system RAM and 6 to 8 core modern CPUs from Intel or AMD.
Optimizing Performance – Quick Visual Quality vs Smoothness Tradeoffs
If your rig is borderline, there are a few tweaks I suggest in the graphics settings menu to boost fluid framerates at the cost of eye-candy:
- Lower overall Image Quality preset level
- Reduce Texture Resolution and Texture Filtering quality
- Disable taxing Shadows setting entirely
- Turn off less noticeable effects like SSAO, SSR, Bloom
The goal – reduce visual fidelity selectively to regain those precious FPS points during intense battles!
I hope this deep dive helps explain why AOE4 has pushed the envelope and sets a new bar for demands amongst real-time strategy games. Let me know if you have any other questions!
