I've been in the AOC general beta for a few months and I can only really say that screenshots cannot do the graphics quality any justice, it really needs to be played to truly guage it's visuals. However, to make it look nice you will need a meaty machine. I have an OcUK overclocked 8800gtx machine with a Q6600 at 3.3ghz, with 4gb RAM. Fortunately I had it come with 64bit Vista Ultimate as I knew that Funcom were building their game to enhance performace on this OS aswell as with full dx10 support.
So far the beta has had many ups and downs, and it's performance varies on different systems with each patch that comes. I have managed to get an average of 25fps on some of the older patches, up to an average of 50-55 fps on more recent patches (apr19th). The current patch which was released last night however seems to be a bad one for quite a number of people - including myself. One thing that the game does universally badly on, and has done for a while now is that it suffers greatly from huge memory leaks. Dependant on how your system is set up, how much RAM you have, and how you set up your virtual memory, page file, many players manage to get the game to run for a few minutes before suffering from freezes and crashes, others manage to run it for a few hours before suffering the same. I personally today seem to hover around the 45 minute mark before the game either sticks, freezes and then survives for another 45 minutes, or freezes and then requires a boot up of task manager to close it. Failing that, the dreaded manual shut down and reboot.
Funcom's developers are insistent that these issues are not going to be a problem when the game is released and that the beta clients are not representative of the finished product by a long way. They also claim that using 64bit windows with a multi core CPU will provide a 30% graphics performance boost when using DX10.
I would be very happy if the release client came without the awful memory leaks, the freezing spikes and stutters(which are caused by shader loading and uncompressed textures being constantly loading in to your machine), and a 30% increase in FPS on the medium/high settings I use on 1920x1200 with DX10 would mean I would manage to obtain around 45fps with lots of players and action going on-screen, and 55-65fps in small group action in most of the areas in the game.
For those not already hooked by the game, and are or aren't in the beta, don't expect to see a polished game on release, and many people are expecting troubles in it's early days, but if they do manage to pull it off at launch then this game has Winner written all over it.