Major framerate boost found…
 

…at least on my GPU (GeForce 7800 GT). Just disable normal mapping for terrain. It doesn't even change the way the game looks as far as I can tell, but frame rate more than doubled. Now it plays smooth as glass at 1024 x 1280, even outdoors. Go figure.

What worked best for me was changing this line in the nwn2.ini in the My Documents games folder where the saves are stored.

SEFCacheSize=20

I changed it to 50 and the game went from playable but sluggish at 1024x768 to smooth on my 6800 SLI setup. It allowed me to turn normal mapping back on with no real impact to performance so far.

What does that control? My performance is pretty good, so I've not messed with much …

I have no idea what it does. I saw it on a thread over on the official NWN2 forums. Figured it didn't hurt to try. For me it made a huge difference.

Outside of playing around with the graphics settings in the game it's the only tweak I made so far.

Normal mapping's incredibly intensive - it's nuts that they normal mapped all terrain! It basically tries to fool you into thinking there's more polygonal detail by having flat textures that have shadows which change based on lighting. Distant terrain in Oblivion is normal mapped for example, so that you can have a smooth hill have the appearance of having it's own pitts and shallows etc., but the normal mapping is very low resolution.

I've not got NWN2 yet (still waiting for my copy to arrive!) but it looks like they've used a much higher resolution normal map to add texture to the terrain. You'll notice it if you fling lights around the place a lot, but otherwise, yeah it should be a good performance boost :)

Hopefully, they will bring out an optimisation patch, as I don't like messing around with settings I don't understand!! :)

I'm going to try this. Everytime I fire this game up I end up trying to do something to give my performance a boost (other than buying a PCIe MB and matching video card).

..most people are much farther along in the OC than I am and I'm supposed to be a hardcore fan.

SEFCacheSize=50 increases the memory cache for special fx. It requires 1gb memory to work properly.