NWN2: Still Bringing Rigs to their Knees?

When NWN2 first came out there was quite a lot of information about how even high end rigs were brought to their knees trying to run this game.

Does it continue to be so demanding or did the patching help and to what extent?

I should finally install it and find out, I've had that damn game for a year and a half. I just upgraded my system with a new motherboard and a Phenom II x4 965, so this would be a good time…

I had no problems at all running this game on a Phenom II X4 955 with 4 GB RAM and a Radeon HD 5770. Frame rates and load times were not an issue.

Patches improved performance considerably on my old P4 with a Geforce 6800 GPU, but the game was still a pig. Loading times was the worst bottleneck for me, so I suspect faster RAM and HD might improve things a bit.

I havent tried the game on more modern systems.

It should be fine on any newer system just as long as you don't turn the environmental shadow quality all the way up or have point light shadows turned on. These options seem to be the biggest performance killers and they don't make a huge difference to the way the game looks.

That said, it still runs noticeably worse than several newer games.

Thanks for all the responses. Amazing that this game is still a hog. It has to be due to poor coding.

Oh well, it doesn't look good then for my main rig which is a socket 939. Some day… some day…

And I am jealous of JDR13's and confab's hardware. Those cpus's are some of the best bang for the buck options out there and are high quality.

Running it great on a skt 939 rig here

Yeah, shadows are still a bit of a hog on graphics cards without too much memory, but they still look darn good compared to a lot of modern games. Patches make the biggest difference to performance though.

Originally Posted by kalniel
Running it great on a skt 939 rig here

Yeah, shadows are still a bit of a hog on graphics cards without too much memory, but they still look darn good compared to a lot of modern games. Patches make the biggest difference to performance though.

May I ask you what your system hardware specs are? My cpu is a dual core 3800+ at 2.0 GHz (no ocing), 2 Gigs of OCZ memory, XP Pro with SP3, SATA HD 7200 rpms, and a 9600GT with 512 megs of DDR3 memory and a 256 bit interface.

I just finished the OC on my Laptop. It runs with almost no hiccups at 1920x1200 with most of the eye candy on max. Exceptions being: AA is off, no soft shadows, no far shadows, all shadow qualities on medium, texture filtering on "anistropic low".

The game would sometimes slow down a bit when I had tons of magical buffs active during battles, but it wasn't annoying since I auto-paused every turn anyway…

I have 1GB of DDR5 in my ATI FirePro M7740 GPU, and a Core 2 Extreme Q9300 @ 2.53 GHz with 4 GB RAM.

Rills, I'd say the weakest link in your system is probably your video card.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Rills, I'd say the weakest link in your system is probably your video card.

How weak would you say? In other words, in your estimation, what could I expect in game play? Thanks.

Originally Posted by Rills
How weak would you say? In other words, in your estimation, what could I expect in game play? Thanks.

I wouldn't know what to expect regarding NWN2, but the 9600GT was a mid-range card 2 years ago, it's definitely lower end by today's standards.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I wouldn't know what to expect regarding NWN2, but the 9600GT was a mid-range card 2 years ago, it's definitely lower end by today's standards.

Yes, by today's standards it is. But if I am not mistaking NWN2 came out before the 9600 did and I was wondering if I kep on medium settings it would do fine. Thoughts?

I'm guessing it should be ok on medium settings @1280x1028 without AA.

Okay, thanks for your time.

This all sounds to me as if I should buy this game rather in 5 years or even longer.

What 'll never understand is why development studios constantly do this: Release games that only a small fraction of gamers can play on the release day: The high-end class of PCs owners.

Remember the later Wing Commander games ?

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
This all sounds to me as if I should buy this game rather in 5 years or even longer.

What 'll never understand is why development studios constantly do this: Release games that only a small fraction of gamers can play on the release day: The high-end class of PCs owners.

Remember the later Wing Commander games ?

I have thought the same thing many times. I don't get. And then even the high end rigs can't handle these games. Can you say Crysis?

It all goes back to coding and its sloppy implementation so much so that it takes today's tech to run games as they were meant to be played 3 years ago. Plus the fact that there are tons of sytems still running DX9 cards, few games that take advantage of DX10 with DX11 cards in the here and now.

Wing Comdr makes sense as they were Origin. The Ultima series was the worst after U5 because they kept designing software that pushed the limits of the microcomputer. I believe some of them even required hard drives when most homes didn't have one.

NWN2 was helped considerably with patches. The fact is Morrowind set the bar so high for RPGs that NWN looked old even when it was new - and that title had some significant graphics upgrades before its release. If they didn't make it good to look at and a compelling game it wouldn't have got out of the gate. NWN was universally hated by critics and warezers for the actual game - these were the kind of folks that held no interest on the toolset.

Anyways, yes the patch helps but OE also made the obtuse decision to change the default camera angle. Make sure you track down the steps in changing it back.

Originally Posted by Rills
May I ask you what your system hardware specs are? My cpu is a dual core 3800+ at 2.0 GHz (no ocing), 2 Gigs of OCZ memory, XP Pro with SP3, SATA HD 7200 rpms, and a 9600GT with 512 megs of DDR3 memory and a 256 bit interface.

First: X2 3800, 2gb RAM, XP Home, 7200rpm HDD and x1950xt 256, which could run it pretty well at 1680x1050, though nearer medium than high.

Then I bought a HD4870 512mb and it ran everything full (inc. AA and AF) except for one shadow option which I put to medium.

Then I got a X2 4400 and went to 3gb RAM which made no difference to the game, but helped the toolset.

Your graphics card is by far the weakest link, especially if you're considering going to 1920x1080. I would recommend at least a GTX 260 (216 shader version) or a 4890 1gb card.

Originally Posted by Rills
When NWN2 first came out there was quite a lot of information about how even high end rigs were brought to their knees trying to run this game.

Does it continue to be so demanding or did the patching help and to what extent?

From what I recall after the second patch this became a non-issue. I know I ran nwn2 on a mid-high end rig with max settings and no issues in performance with it patched.