Neverwinter Nights 2

[giantgnome]

It's running like shit on my computer. P 3.2, 2 gigs, Radeon X1950 GT 256mb. I was hoping to play through it and Mask of the Betrayer but the way it stutters takes all the fun out of it. I even tried turning everything off (bloom, water reflection ect.) and view distance half-way down. Is this normal? Any help at all is appreciated.

 

[TheLostOne]

Turning shadows off made the biggest difference to me, and I can live without them. I'd heard MotB improved the performance of the game. Do you have it installed or just planning to buy it later?

 

[Pseudofool]

Do you have the latest patch? Are you running programs in the background (Norton, McAfee) that eat up resources? I think RAM is the biggest asset to making NWN2 run well.

 

[Redeye]

It sucks.

 

[giantgnome]

Have both NWN and MotB installed and fully patched. Disabled McAfee to play it and tried turning off shadows. It lags bad. Sometimes it runs better than others but overall not great. I could actually increase my RAM to 4 gb but would it be worth it? Given that my computer is AGP and single core it's pretty close to as good as it gets before I need to build a new one, and that will be a long way off.

 

[ghostdog]

Don't bother with the OC , it's crap.

Disable all shadows in the advanced graphic settings menu and also disable Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering.

 

[cardtrick]

You could try the Tweak Guide. I gained 10 FPS or so, bringing me to a very playable 25, without losing much video quality.

Unfortunately for you, though, NWN2 tends to be much more CPU-bound than GPU-bound; your X1950 GT is a great card, and should be more than enough, but that processor isn't really up to snuff. Do try the tweak guide, though, and definitely turn grass off and shadows down. Also consider looking into some mods; most of them add playable missions, but there are some with performance effects. In particular, I used one that turned down spell and buff effects. (I used it for the visual change, but I also noticed a performance boost.)

Oh! I just remembered something. Have you tried turning off EAX? That can make a huge difference if you're using an onboard sound card. For me, it didn't increase performance much, but it drastically cut the frequency of crashes on area transitions.

 

[giantgnome]

Thanks. I'll try that.

 

[Disconnected]

Don't expect too much. NWN2 performance is fairly independent of hardware. For example, I can get about 20-25fps in the slowest areas, if I disable the sound outright. No other game settings makes a difference

My wife gets exactly the same FPS, regardless of the settings.

Our machines? Mine's an OC'ed Q6600/8800gtx/2GB RAM. Hers is an OC'ed Q6800/2x8800gtx/4GB RAM/X-Fi Sound Blaster.

Basically the NWN2 engine is fubar. Playable though, fortunately, but just barely.

 

[fastpunk]

Don't expect too much. NWN2 performance is fairly independent of hardware. For example, I can get about 20-25fps in the slowest areas, if I disable the sound outright. No other game settings makes a difference

My wife gets exactly the same FPS, regardless of the settings.

Our machines? Mine's an OC'ed Q6600/8800gtx/2GB RAM. Hers is an OC'ed Q6800/2x8800gtx/4GB RAM/X-Fi Sound Blaster.

Basically the NWN2 engine is fubar. Playable though, fortunately, but just barely.

How come she gets the better computer?

Anyway, what's been said so far is pretty true but turning Shadows to low, removing Normal Mapped Terrain and Point Light Shadows (or something similar) can really improve performance. Some areas are fucked up in terms of optimization but for most others turning off those settings will help greatly.

 

[cardtrick]

One more point is that even if you're unable to get NWN 2 playable, you should still give MOTB a try. The engine tweaks from MOTB update NWN2, so there's no difference there, but the MOTB areas in general seem better optimized; at any rate, I don't remember any performance issues at all while playing it, whereas I had plenty with NWN2.

 

[inwoker]

wow, it runs almost perfectly on my p4 2.6 northwood, 1024mb ram, geforce 7600

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

i ran most of nwn2 with a 3.4 northwood, 1 gig of ram, and a 9800 pro ATI. I had to turn everything to the lowest setting and disable all the bells and shit but it ran okay for me after that. The only problem is that it looks like shit but I can live with it. From the small amount I played of MOTB it seems the performance is a bit better but I only played in a cave so far.

 

[Dhruin]

Huh. It ran OK (just, admittedly) on my old laptop (P4M 1.7, 1.5Gb, X600), quite well on my old desktop with medium settings (P4 3.2, 2Gb, 6800GT) and very nicely with almost everything on high with my current laptop (c2d 2.4, 4Gb, 8600M, Vista).

 

[Wyrmlord]

One more point is that even if you're unable to get NWN 2 playable, you should still give MOTB a try. The engine tweaks from MOTB update NWN2, so there's no difference there, but the MOTB areas in general seem better optimized; at any rate, I don't remember any performance issues at all while playing it, whereas I had plenty with NWN2.

Some lagging at Skein happened to me, but that's all.

 

[Disconnected]

Evidently you guys have a different idea of what "well" means in terms of game performance, so to clarify: 60fps is good. 30 is borderline. If it ever dips below 30 you're looking at a 3D imitation of Stop Motion animation, and especially in games where the camera is atttatched to something that moves, that's really fucking painful to look at.

My point was that NWN2 simply cannot run at more than 20-25fps in some areas, no matter how much you disable the graphics and/or how fast your hardware is. So if that's what you're currently suffering, you may as well crank up the visual quality until it starts affecting performance. Chances are it won't.

 

[cardtrick]

Evidently you guys have a different idea of what "well" means in terms of game performance, so to clarify: 60fps is good. 30 is borderline. If it ever dips below 30 you're looking at a 3D imitation of Stop Motion animation, and especially in games where the camera is atttatched to something that moves, that's really fucking painful to look at.

Okay, that's obviously an exaggeration. Stop motion? Come on. Only for multiplayer shooters is having 60+ FPS important. 30 isn't borderline at all, especially not for an RPG, and an RTWP one at that -- it's eminently playable. (Unless I'm misunderstanding you, and you meant that 30 is the borderline between "running well" and "playable" -- I might agree with that, although I think the border for me is closer to 25.)

FPS doesn't become an actual problem until it dips below 15 or so. The real issue is stuttering, which is often associated with sub-30 FPS, but which is a separate issue. My 25 FPS with no stuttering at max in Bioshock is a hell of a lot better than my 50 FPS with frequent minor stutters in Oblivion.

Of course, NWN2 suffers from both problems. My suggestion earlier about the EAX most likely won't improve FPS, but for many people it will increase stability and reduce stuttering, which is probably more important. (On the other hand, the sound effects are noticably worse, to the point that I actually found it worthwhile to only disable EAX for large area transitions, even though that meant going into my options menu each time.)

 

[Disconnected]

Cardtrick we'll have to agree to disagree. When I play games I don't want to watch unresponsive slide shows. I'd much, much rather have simplistic visuals and 60fps than an unresponsive, photorealistic slideshow.

Someone asked earlier why my wife has the faster of our gaming machines. The answer is: because most of the heavy duty 3D gaming I do, is racing games thru a projector, with her (and usually a bunch of friends). So we only need 1 fast machine. Yet I coughed up for a fairly fast gfx card (fastest at the time) because I want my fucking 60fps or I can't stand looking at it.

NWN2 is a massive let-down in this respect, because even at settings ment for hardware 5 generations older than my shit, it still won't run at anywhere near 60fps. Though perhaps the unresponsive slide show'ness of it all is by design. After all they were insane enough to forcefully delay the right-click functionality in the game, presumably to give the player the feeling that the game isn't just sluggish, it has a mind of its own and disproves of your bothersome meddeling.

If a game has to be able to use 50 times the resources of any PC ever build, then do like Crysis: great visuals on lower settings & lower settings that actually system requirements. I'm still playing (and loving) it, and no, I don't play it at max quality. But I do play it at an almost perfectly constrant 60fps & damn it plays well.

 

[giantgnome]

That was the problem I was having. The game would turn into a slideshow, especially in the intro area but often times I'll find it happening in battle. I've managed to get it to run a little better and at least playable but it is annoying. It seems strange to me but turning everything off on the graphics options or turning it all on/all the way up seems to have very little impact on performance. For what I'm getting in a game I'd expect this to run a little smoother. I recall Oblivion running and looking better than this.

 

[Thalkirst]

Runs fine here will all settings maxed on an AMD X2 3800+, 2 Gig RAM, 8800 GTS 640M and XP, with rare slowdowns in certain areas and when a lot of spells are cast in battles.

 

[Lurkar]

Game works fine for me unless it's at an outside area. No matter how small or large, my machine slows to a veritable crawl.

 

[giantgnome]

Ok so I'm giving up on NWN2. I got to Neverwinter and the game slows down to about 2fps. I've tried pretty much everything but it is virtually unplayable. If the combat was turned-based instead of realtimewithpauseshit then it probably wouldn't be as terrible, however I can't figure out what the hell is going on in battle. I still win because combat is so easy but overall it just isn't worth it.

So I looked at the recommendations on my box: 3ghz (I have 3.2), 1gb (I have 2), 256 ATI X1600 (I have X1950 GT). Looks like I exceed the recommendations. Not sure if there could be any other problems but with antivirus, antispyware shut down and everything turned down/off it still sucks. So I'm done until I build a new comp in 2-3 years. Maybe it will run better on that.

 

[Ismaul]

Cardtrick we'll have to agree to disagree. When I play games I don't want to watch unresponsive slide shows. I'd much, much rather have simplistic visuals and 60fps than an unresponsive, photorealistic slideshow.

You do know that movies run at 24 fps? Seems quite fluid to me. cardtrick is right, it's sudden drops below 24 fps that make the game look choppy. Movies are always constant.


Anyways, it runs mostly fine on my PC, most things maxed except shadows and no AA. I got a dual-core E6750 overclocked at 3.2 GHz, 2gbs of ram and a Radeon 3870. Of note: things used to be a bit choppy for me until I turned on V-sync, which smoothed things out. YMMV. Also, first things to turn off are far shadows and point light shadows. They eat a shitload of resources, and don't really make the game look better.

 

[bobisimo]

For me (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+, 2 GB dual-channel RAM, nVidia 7800 GT, MotB installed), the biggest factor affecting my FPS was the screen resolution (though I agree that shadows and point lights are more than significant).

Basically, I could go 1280x1024 with everything at high and shadows/lights turned off and get really good FPS, but if I wanted to go wide screen (which I did) and get similarly good FPS, I had to turn everything down to low or off.

To be honest, the game, to me, didn't look *much* different at the lower settings, and the advantages of wide screen, again, to me, were worth the slightly worse looks. Anyway, the point is to pay attention to your resolution as well because wide screen kills game performance with NWN2 and MotB.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Is this normal?

It's normal in the weird world of badly designed game engines.

See "recommended rating". One of those is a tech demo of a fully-blown FPS with atmospheric munchkins, super-bloom and fissiks damage. The other is NWN2.