Damn. If I’d known that I would have ordered the regular edition. Hopefully someone on eBay will at least pay a few euros for the NWN1 copy that I already have.
Aye its the EU versions only. Seems USA gets full 170 page manual and Europe gets stuck with 30 page DVD case leaflet and a PDF file. Looks like the PDF file is A4 format so I guess that it will contain the same info in its 80 pages as the 170 page US version. It has tables and such, so I hope I at least have all the info now, but since skimping on a PDF file would be really silly, I guess that this is the case.
I never get why they make those changes between versions, don’t they get that customers will complain about it? Maybe they don’t know about the internet yet and that customers talk to each other about what they get…
Ah well, printed the manual myself now. All patched up and ready to go now so when work is done I can start playing!
Okies back to the grind!
I just found out how to show the FPS. Hit tilde and then type “showfps”. You can hit tilde again to hide the console, and the fps counter will remain. Try fiddling around with the options and get it to a decent framerate. I had to change my texturing settings to Medium on a 256MB video card, which makes me cry, to get the FPS above 10 on average. Changing the shadows from high to medium, turning off point lights and bloom and normal mapping on terrain all helped a bit. The game looks uglier now, and in particular the medium level textures for your Uncle are just plain AWFUL. Everyone else seems to be “ok” enough though. I don’t really see what happened there, but I have to guess that it’s accidentally using the “Low” texture version for him.
Yeesh. I can’t wait for a patch for these performance problems. Version 1.00 of the game felt faster to me.
the frame rate issue is weird. with showfps on, in towns it shows me as running at around 10-11fps in general, but it really doesn’t feel like it, apart from the occasional slow down.
I don’t believe showfps is working correctly. It shows the same framerate, regardless of whether or not SLI has been enabled, even though there is obvious improvement of framerate.
Also, I’ve been experiencing very odd behavior after exiting the game and rebooting my computer. For whatever reason, my secondary video card gets reassigned as my primary, and then I receive a message about SLI being enabled. My mouse doesn’t display when I plug my monitor into my secondary video card, and the monitor claims no signal when connected to my primary. I have to manually disable, then re-enable, SLI, then reconnect my monitor to the primary video card. Very very very frustrating, especially when I am stuck with using only the keyboard to do the changes.
Latest drivers from Nvidia, which have a profile for SLI included. I think I’m going to roll-back and use my custom profile. Didn’t have these problems with that setup.
I can’t say about sli setups, but the in-game fps counter seems fairly accurate unless both it and fraps are wrong.
Showfps works fine for me, but no SLI.
Disabling vsync, point shadows, normal mapped terrain, installing the new nv drivers, and dropping textures to medium got me up to 30fps and smoothed out gameplay overall. It still stutters quite a bit but at least it isn’t totally exasperating.
Okay, reverted back to the earlier drivers and now showfps shows a difference in framerate for SLI vs. non-SLI modes.
For me, forced split frame rendering provided the best framerate. Alternate frame rendering 1 yielded results not much better than Single GPU, and while alternate frame rendering 2 matched forced split frame rendering for framerate, it came at the expense of odd graphical anamolies in the party portraits.
The only in-game settings which affected my framerate were resolution (duh), shadows, bloom & water reflection/refractivity. Each level or option enabled lowered the framerate by 5, to a minimum of 5 fps @ 800x600) with the exception of low shadows & no shadows where there was no difference in framerate. Max framerate attained at specific save game point for all these tests @ 800x600 was 20 fps. Lowest was 5 fps with all options enabled. Max framerate attained @ 1368x768 was 10fps. Lowest was 5fps with all options enabled. It’s rather odd the framerate was always given in multiples of 5 for me when in split frame rendering mode. Alternate frame rendering mode 1 & single GPU mode did not produce a framerate in multiple of 5 (14 fps @ 800x600 & 12 fps @ 800x600 respectively)
Setting CPU affinity had no effect (the game is not multithreaded) and using the nwn2main_amdxp.exe (I have dual core 4200+ AMD CPU) in place of nwn2main.exe had no effect.
I’m now going to change my graphic card settings one by one to see if those net any gains but I’m not holding my breath.
Something is limiting the framerate and I don’t think it’s entirely the graphics. Areas where the character is facing a corner in a dungeon where there is no hidden geometry beyond netted me the same maximum framerates (according to showfps) as experienced in more graphically cluttered areas as encountered in cities.
EDIT: Okay, I was actually able to squeeze out some more frames by adjusting some settings for the card. Apparently, V-sync is on by default in NWN 2, which for whatever reason, chose to limit me to 20 fps. Now, I get in the upper 20s and low 30s for areas with low graphical density after I forced v-sync off. Also, numbers reported no longer were in multiples of 5.
Anti-aliasing can also be forced but as expected it results in a framerate loss when used. I experienced a loss of 2.5 fps @ 800x600 for 2x anti-aliasing.
To further increase the framerate, I set texture filtering to high performance. The textures look muddy, but for me it’s an acceptable trade off for framerate.
All the other settings had no effect.
What is your video card?
I’m on a GeForce 6800 PCI-Express, which is not so hot, running at 1280x800 on high textures, bloom on, shadows/water off, normalized lightmap terrain (or whatever it’s called) off, texture filters on linear, and I average about 20-25fps via showfps. It’s visually attractive, and runs a bit on the slow side but certainly tolerable (the input lag bugs me more than the framerate).
Am I just lucky, and match the test configs that they used? Is there really some common factor that performance sufferers have in their systems that is causing such massive performance degredation?
There’s no way that all these people with better systems than mine should be getting such markedly worse-sounding performance. My system is very modest and running the game just fine, with more eye candy options than I need (high textures in particular really makes the biggest difference visually, and for me I couldn’t notice a performance change).
I’m using a clean install of the newest Detonator drivers that came out the other day, so maybe that’s helping, but I had decent performance with my old drivers, too. I think something is up with this game’s graphics technology, not just that it is a high performance pig but something broken under the hood for many people, and it’s a shame.
The only upside to that being the potential situation is that it makes it more likely that there will be a magic optimization patch coming down the pipe, but I still wouldn’t want to have to hold my breath on that.
Dual 6600s with 256 MB each.
I can get 30-40 fps in Oblivion (High settings, no bloom or HDR), Quake 4 (all settings high) & FEAR (mostly high, with some medium settings) @ 1368x768.
Now, I understand Desslock’s comment about high system reqs. The graphics engine seems very un-optimized. Someone at the [url=http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=510031&forum=109"Bioware boards has a rig with dual 7800 GTXs in it and they are only getting 30 fps @ 800x600 with all graphic settings set to minimums.
However, they are using the same drivers I am now, and they do not seem to be saavy enough to realize they must create a custom profile for NWN 2, in order to use multi-GPU rendering. It also looks like his vsync is on, as he has 2 results, 1 for 800x600 and the other for 1024x768 which yielded the same framerate.
I’m going to disable SLI completely and see if that has any effect on my framrate.
EDIT: Nope. Disabling SLI resulted in the same framerate as Single GPU rendering with SLI enabled, though now with vsync turned off I get 21 fps @ 800x600 non-SLI & only 28 fps @ 800x600 SLI, both in the same spot. Some people are reporting boosts to performance with the newer drivers and SLI, but my problems with the new drivers are preventing me from enjoying those benefits.
Something does seem awry with the performance. I’ve got a budget 7600GT, and I’m getting (slightly) better framerates than your SLI setup. 1280x800, averaging around 25, no shadows, no AA, ani on, bloom on.
Does anyone have the bug where the “free cam” suddenly looks straight up at the sky, with no way of pointing it back at the ground? This has happened to me about 5 times now, and is extremely annoying.
Okay, I think I finally realized why my framerates seem to be so subpar.
I play exclusively in drive mode. When I went to top down I get 20-25 fps @ 1368x768.
My guess is everyone else is playing top-down, chase, or free-form?
Top down all the way here. Free cam in combat. Every once in a while I’ll drop the camera down to look at something in the distance, but framerates are horrible in some zones when doing this.
Ugh. Now I’m getting a bug where all enemies do 0 damage to two of my party members. Anyone hear of this one?
Yep, happens to me all the time, I have to switch camera modes, move about, and switch back. Sometimes that works, sometiems it doesn’t. Also the free cam can bug quests it seems, I have had several cutscenes not fire properly because of it.
Otherwise yep, top down for moving around and free cam for combat.
Well, now all three of my companions take 0 damage from enemies no matter what. I tried reloading, zoning, changing the difficulty… nothing makes them take damage again.
My last non-quicksave was about 2 hours previous. The game is pretty much over for me now, unless they patch it.
I just read on the official forums that this has happened to many people, and it eventually goes away. I’m going to keep playing and see if it goes away.
What we euros get fooled again. Fuck you Atari!
Well i will wait for the bargin bin where it will arrive in January… Or i will buy it used!
I’m running AMD 3000, 6800, 1gig on Win2k, mid to low 20s average fps mostly in top down camera, usually mid to high teens driving cam. 1280x1024, everything on and high but shadows (looks great). It’s got to be a driver or software issue.