How much power needed for IWD smooth in big battles?

[techwanabe]

My rig is listed below in the sig. I like playing IWD and other Infinity Engine games. I'm anticipating IWD II this June also.

With my current system, I've experienced some severe slow downs during large battles with alot of magic FX happening on screen. For those who have played it, here is an example: Battle with Yxonomie (snake lady) with many spell effects, animation slows way down to a jerky crawl. It's hard to control things like that and it makes the game hard to play. This also happens with certain spell effects like Frost Breath and Stinking Cloud. The rest of the time, the game runs smoothly. I had the same problems with Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal - some really big battles, it was very hard to control. There would be major delays while the computer is calculating battle statistics and I'd be trying to make an action but watching my player die.

I'd like to upgrade my system enough to get animation smooth during these battles. Does anyone have higher speed system specs and can vouch they get good performance during these parts of the game. I'd like an idea of what it will take. Thanks.

 

[Adrian Tung]

Personally, I'd go for a faster processor and more RAM. Although I didn't play IWD that much, I played BG, BG2 and BG2:TOB a lot, and also had performance problems when I was playing on my rig, which was once a Celeron 600MHz with 192MB RAM. Once I upgraded to a P III 800MHz and 512MB (which was around last year), performance improved significantly in those games.


atwl

 

[techwanabe]

Adrian, Did you see my specs? I'm running at 733 mhz with 256 mb RAM... I could ad another 128 stick of RAM and see what that does. My speed is 3x the minimum game spec for speed and 4x for RAM. But apparently it really needs a lot more CPU power to process those spell FX. I'll bet doubling my CPU to 1.4 ghz won't entirely cure the slow downs, but it may take a big bite out of it. I think I"ve heard of people with 1.3 ghz processors still seeing minor slowdowns. I think that infinity engine is a power hog in certain situations. But I'd love to see feed back.

 

[Staver]

At present, I've only played the first 2 areas of this game, but did finish all the BG and BG2 games, so I know about the pausing you speak of. My system is similar to yours except I have 1G of memory and a Matrox G400Max. I tend to play at 1024 X 768. On my system the slowdown is not extreme. I think it might be the video pipeline getting saturated due to all the special effects and enemies on the screen, but I'm no expert in that area. The last battle that had this slowdown was the battle versus the Fire Giant and his army in BG2-TOB, but the final battle in that game was semi-smooth, so it might be number of enemies on screen rather then spell effects that is causing the slow down. Have you tried saving, exiting then reloading to see if it clears out extra crap in video memory? You can turn off some of the spell lighting effects if is really unplayable on your system.

 

[techwanabe]

Staver, I wouldn't say that the slow downs make the game unplayable. I too played BG1, BG2 and TOB. I played TOB online with a friend in the same town and the end battle did seem to exhibit alot of delays... like even if I'd hit pause, my characters would keep taking damage because the system was behind running the battle turns or calculating the damage. Animation would be rather jerky too. We really had to pause alot during the end battle with Mellisan.

I have heard the developers at Bioware and Black Isle state that some of the FX textures are large and eat alot of CPU time. I am planning on upgrading my system (inexpensively) to a new mobo and CPU - Cely 1.0A overclocked to 1.4 ghz on an ABIT ST6 motherboard. Hopefully this will net a substantial increase in performance. I'll wait to upgrade the video card until Unreal II or NWN is out since those are 3D games. BG2 and IWD don't really seem to benefit from 3D acceleration and even when you switch on the 3D enhancements, often the picture looks worse. Not sure why the 3D option is offered frankly.

 

[MGMorden]

I've got an Athlon 1200 and 512mb of ram. It did get a little jerky at times (well, on BG2 and ToB; haven't gotten very far in IWD yet), but not enough to cause problems for me (but then again I pause A LOT in between battles for micromanagemnet). If you want to upgrade then you can go ahead but I really don't think it'll help much. Probably more software related than hardware (though that does open the possibility that the engine's performance may be improved in IWD2).

I'm also excited about IWD2 (though I REALLY would have preferred PS: Torment 2) and NWN. Those 2 + Warcraft 3 are the only games on the PC that even have my interest right now.