This is not normal at all.
Like you, this game overtaxes my system and everyone’s I game with. We can play any other game we have on ultra settings and have zero issues. With Conan Exiles, like you’ve described, on full settings the temps can exceed 70 c and GPU usage pegs out on higher end rigs that should be swallowing this game whole.
And, as you say, the video settings make little to no difference in the GPU usage, temps, or the ever present stutter in the game whether the vid setting are lowest to highest. I’ve tried them all.
I and many others have posted about this pretty much since day one with no solutions offered, blame of our rigs, I’ve had my intelligence insulted by other users and even by a certain person in Funcom (I won’t mention the name) who said my claims were hyperbole, and a whole lot of dead silence from the devs. And as I’ve pointed out dozens of times, if the problem exists with just one game on many computers as well as consoles…it isn’t the rigs. Something in the game isn’t right.
You’re definitely not alone in this.
Here’s a link to one of the posts from these forums a long time ago. This one deals mostly with the stutter/performance which I believe is related to your topic. Sadly, it’s never been fixed or redressed for many players.