[quixadhal]

It looks like Age of Conan attempts to pre-load the shader.cache.local file while playing the opening movies. I noticed that whenever I clear that file, the movies play back flawlessly, but if it's there, they stutter more and more every time I launch the client (since the cache grows over time).

Today, it apparently used enough resources to lock my audio drivers and required me to hard boot the machine.

I *highly* suggest that you either reduce the priority of the shader pre-loading thread, increase the pre-buffering of the bink video playback routine, or both!

Multi-tasking like that might be fine on people with multi-core systems and 10K RPM SATA drives, but it fails pretty miserably for those of us just above the box specs.