NWN Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition - Beamdog's final enhancement - now with new premium modules

[Gargaune]

Hah! I've been playing with Beamdog's new party controls for a while but I only just figured this out - the "go to" command includes opening doors! Even if it's unexplored and invisible, just Shift + Click on the black space behind a closed door and your selected henchman will navigate to that spot, whether that means opening an unlocked door or bashing it down otherwise.

Overall, the feature takes quite a bit of micromanagement but it's an absolute godsend, you can genuinely play a backline character properly now and exercise some measure of tactical control going into combat.

 

[Chippy]

I'm trying to play NWN:EE again because of Luke Scull's mods and I made the mistake of installing the HD textures. Now everything (especially in cities) is a-stuttering. Fucking Beamdog strikes again. Anyone know if the community fixes solve this? Thanks.

PC is more than enough to handle it. 32GB Ram 12 GB card, etc.

 

[Gargaune]

I'm trying to play NWN:EE again because of Luke Scull's mods and I made the mistake of installing the HD textures. Now everything (especially in cities) is a-stuttering. Fucking Beamdog strikes again. Anyone know if the community fixes solve this? Thanks.

PC is more than enough to handle it. 32GB Ram 12 GB card, etc.

Well, for starters, disable the HD Art Pack (Options -> Graphics -> Facelifts, I think, don't use it myself), the original low-poly assets are more cohesive anyway.

Second, stuttering in crowded areas is related to FPS somehow, in my experiences:
- V-Sync on gives you smooth camera movement and GPU usages, but can cause some stutters in high-density areas;
- FPS Limiter instead of V-Sync gets rid of those stutters, but can cause some stutter and input-lag on camera zoom and rotation;
- Using neither V-Sync nor the FPS Limiter will have everything smooth, but your GPU revs up and the Toolset's Test Module function becomes practically unusable;

Try those out and see how it goes for you. Keep in mind that this is all on Exclusive Fullscreen, haven't tested Borderless in a long time but I think I had issues with it. Post back how you get on, I'm curious.

 

[Gargaune]

Okay, so for shits and giggles I had another look at it and came away with some interesting observations... Specs here are an i7-9700k, 16GB RAM, RTX 4070, outputting to a 60Hz 1680x1050 screen and I slapped Afterburner onto a crowded city area to check loads.

Native Resolution (1680x1050)	V-Sync 60	FPS Limit 120
GPU	50%	~35%
CPU	6%	12%

nVidia DSR 4X (3360x2100)	V-Sync 60	FPS Limit 120
GPU	40%	~70%
CPU	6%	12%

When V-Sync is enabled, we get that slight "motion" stuttering when the PC is moving around in a very busy scene, with lots of NPCs milling about, like every few steps the game just trips for a sec. This does not happen at all if we use the FPS Limiter set to 120 instead (or leave it uncapped, but there's other issues in either case), so a first layman's guess is that some of the game's core processing is getting bottlenecked by the render thread, right?

But more interestingly (and maybe less NWN-related) is what DSR does to the numbers... At native, swapping V-Sync 60 for a simple frame limiter at 120 reduces GPU load quite dramatically, but at DSR 4X this trend is just as dramatically reversed. Even more gobsmacking, however, is that V-Sync Native has a higher GPU load than DSR V-Sync. I double-checked that specifically, it wasn't a fluke. How does that work out, more image data results in less V-Sync load somehow? Or do nVidia's tensor cores sacrifice a goat when I'm not looking?

Paging local graphics geeks RobotSquirrel, Bad Sector, King Crispy.

 

[King Crispy]

The only thing I can come up with is some quirk in Beamdog's EE engine and/or the tweaks they've made to the original. Vertical Synchronization should never actually add overhead as far as I know but in this case, maybe?

 

[Gargaune]

The only thing I can come up with is some quirk in Beamdog's EE engine and/or the tweaks they've made to the original. Vertical Synchronization should never actually add overhead as far as I know but in this case, maybe?

For what it's worth, I repeated the test with V-Sync forced via nVidia Control Panel, off in-game (it didn't even used to have in-built V-Sync until the latest major patch), and the results were the same.

But here's another interesting tidbit - I've long kept Threaded Optimisation set to Off in nVidia Control Panel (recall someone saying something about instability, I guess), but I decided to take the opposite approach and force it On. CPU usage went up from 6% to 15% but the game was still hitching in motion in the test scene. This is despite the nominal CPU usage being higher than the 12% I got with a 120 FPS limit, so I guess this occasional stuttering must be strictly FPS-related rather than a matter of CPU headroom?

 

[Chippy]

Gargaune Thanks for the replies - I missed all this with account probs. Will test further and compare over the next few days & weekend. atm I've got micro stutter as I move around and it seems when the HD textures for characters load in.

PC:
Win10 AMD Ryzen 5700g CPU
32GB RAM & 12GB Geforce 3060 card
500gb SSD 12GB/sec (I think)

Atm everything is off under the Geforce settings, and I capped vsync at 60fps. I'm sure I didn't have any of this last time I ran it with the normal textures on a potato pc. I'm running the community HD pack and installed that only - I didn't install over Beamshit's work.

 

[Chippy]

Gargaune So in layman's terms Beamdog dun' fuqqed it up?. The best I can get is to lock it at 60fps max frame rate and to have vsync on, then allocate about 10gb to shader cache. Not even sure if that made a difference.

But the community HD pack seems to have improved things slightly over the original V1.0 from Beamdog that outright breaks the game. Apparently it's the faces, and they didn't even put man-face Aribeth in there. I tried downloading her face just for lulz and it broke every texture for my PC and her.

TBH I'm kinda reaching my limit of patience with this game. It was nice to find out you could edit 2da.Baseitems to make any weapon a monk weapon, and now that just decided to stop working. They made some nice changes with the EE like permanent attack modes such as power attack and flurry, but someone just nuke Beamdog from orbit.

After a week or more of playing I'm seriously considering going back to the diamond edition and all the new stuff can piss off.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Gargaune So in layman's terms Beamdog dun' fuqqed it up?. The best I can get is to lock it at 60fps max frame rate and to have vsync on, then allocate about 10gb to shader cache. Not even sure if that made a difference.

But the community HD pack seems to have improved things slightly over the original V1.0 from Beamdog that outright breaks the game. Apparently it's the faces, and they didn't even put man-face Aribeth in there. I tried downloading her face just for lulz and it broke every texture for my PC and her.

TBH I'm kinda reaching my limit of patience with this game. It was nice to find out you could edit 2da.Baseitems to make any weapon a monk weapon, and now that just decided to stop working. They made some nice changes with the EE like permanent attack modes such as power attack and flurry, but someone just nuke Beamdog from orbit.

After a week or more of playing I'm seriously considering going back to the diamond edition and all the new stuff can piss off.

The Diamond Edition has plently of bugs that the EE actually adressed but we've come to a point where Beamdog overdid it and went into fucking shit up territory.

 

[Chippy]

Gargaune So in layman's terms Beamdog dun' fuqqed it up?. The best I can get is to lock it at 60fps max frame rate and to have vsync on, then allocate about 10gb to shader cache. Not even sure if that made a difference.

But the community HD pack seems to have improved things slightly over the original V1.0 from Beamdog that outright breaks the game. Apparently it's the faces, and they didn't even put man-face Aribeth in there. I tried downloading her face just for lulz and it broke every texture for my PC and her.

TBH I'm kinda reaching my limit of patience with this game. It was nice to find out you could edit 2da.Baseitems to make any weapon a monk weapon, and now that just decided to stop working. They made some nice changes with the EE like permanent attack modes such as power attack and flurry, but someone just nuke Beamdog from orbit.

After a week or more of playing I'm seriously considering going back to the diamond edition and all the new stuff can piss off.

The Diamond Edition has plently of bugs that the EE actually adressed but we've come to a point where Beamdog overdid it and went into fucking shit up territory.

Yeah, I thought it was just me. My strategy with Beamdog has been to totally ignore them for years. This means I will have a faint memory of the retardation that was SOD if I ever play it again - which I probably wont. And I deliberately ignored everything about NWN so I could approach it impartially.

And I swear that after picking up devestating critical in act 2 of the main campaign (I'm cheating with XP) I went through the entire northern caves and all enemies in the surrounding areas and didn't score 1 devestating crit on a threat of 15-20. I only got one with the text in the surrounding forest in the Charwood and even then it was after I cleared Wanev's mansion.

So I expect they either nerfed it or broke it. The battle text says the enemy failed a save at a DC of 34...

Also plenty of other bugs throughout the campaign. But in true Beamdog fashion they're evident, compared to the Diamond Edition. I think they're doing it on purpose.

 

[Gargaune]

The best I can get is to lock it at 60fps max frame rate and to have vsync on

What? It's either one or the other, if you tick both only the lowest will apply.

Look, I'm guessing you don't intend to start building your own modules so disable V-Sync and instead use the Frame Limiter and set its values to 120/10/120. That should give you pretty smooth motion regardless of density and I doubt you'll notice the turn/zoom lag unless you're as anal as I am.

And disable the HD Art Pack already. The DE doesn't have it anyway and it's not worth forgoing all the other EE perks just out of spite over not getting the new skinmeshed Aribeth. At this point, the new EE party controls alone basically render the DE obsolete.

It was nice to find out you could edit 2da.Baseitems to make any weapon a monk weapon, and now that just decided to stop working.

Hey, man, stuff in NWN doesn't just "stop working" for no reason, this shit wasn't made by Todd Howard. If your edited .2da was working before and you haven't changed anything, you must be overriding it with another .2da (either a mod or a module). Remember that module haks take priority over pretty much anything else.

I think they're doing it on purpose.

Put down the lemon-lime, Gunther.