All things considered, LotRO absolutely ****'s all over every other MMO in terms of visuals. RIFT for one uses the awful Creation Engine, so performance wise your going to need twice the specs to get it smooth, EVE is dark, bland and set in space which really is not a great deal to render at once. LotRO on the other hand has a fantastic art style, some of the best shadows I've seen in an MMO, and is built almost flawlessly. Seriously Age of Conan gave me about 30-40fps on max, plus the animations and gameplay were AWFUL. Remember, visuals isn't just about textures and polygons, LotRO has some amazing combat animations. With the settings I was using everything on screen is rendered at maximum quality, a tree that is 200 meters away looks exactly the same with the same resolution textures and polygon count as one that is 200 millimeters away... 100+ frames per second. Lol. As for the free to play vs premium graphics, they are the same.
I'd be shocked if my system could run RIFT above 30 without a million stutters a second.
Visuals are: Graphics, animations, optimization & performance. (In my eyes)
LotRO
Graphics: 7/10
Animations: 9/10
Opt & per: 10/10
RIFT
Graphics: 9/10
Animations: 6/10
Opt & per: 4/10
EVE
Graphics: 8/10
Animations: 2/10
Opt & per: Not played!
Age of Conan:
Graphics: 7/10 (seriously wasn't that amazing)
Animations: 0/10 (eurgh)
Opt & per: 6/10
LotRO looks amazing in general, let alone when you consider the kind of hardware you need to run it, and has the most amazing draw distance I think I've seen yet.
That's just my opinion of course, but wouldn't you say Resident Evil 4 & 5 looked amazing for their time and the hardware they had? Yes.
