NWN performance

[techwanabe]

I have NWN installed on my PC shown in the sig below. I looks good and runs "ok" but it is a little sluggish and a bit jerky... not nearly as smooth as I'd like it. It seems my PC is well above the specs, but... I'm guessing since I'm running at a respectible 1.33 ghz, my video card may be to blame. A Radeon 32DDR isn't a power house by todays standards, but I thought it should be able to handle NWN well. Perhaps there are some tweeks I could do?

Game Specs from Bioware:

Required/Recommended
Processor Pentium® II 450 MHz or AMD K6 450 MHz / Pentium® III 800 MHz or AthlonTM 800 MHz
Operating System Windows 98/ME/2000SP2/XP
RAM (Windows 98/ME) 96 MB / 128 MB
RAM (Windows 2000/XP) 128 MB / 256 MB
Hard Disk Installation 1.2 GB / 2.0 GB
CD ROM or CD/DVD ROM Drive 8X
DirectX DirectX® version 8.1
Video Card 16 MB TNT2-class OpenGL 1.2 compliant video card NVIDIA GeForce 2/ATI Radeon
Sound Card DirectX® certified sound card
Multiplayer IPX or TCP/IP via LAN or Internet
Multiplayer via Modem 56k (2 players max) broadband

 

[murphy55d]

Despite what Bioware says, you need a decent machine to run this game(I can't even imagine this on an 800mhz Athlon with a TNT2). I have an Athlon XP 2000+(OC'd 1800+), 512 of PC3000 and a Ti4200(@4400 speed) and it'll slow down on mine sometimes as well. (of course I do have AA turned on, but still).
Just make sure AA and AF are off, and maybe go down in game resolution... of course you'll be sacrificing quality for smoothness, but it's just a pretty graphic intensive game.

 

[igowerf]

System requirements are usually the absolute, bare minimum needed to run the game. A PII 450 with a 16MB TNT2 just won't cut it these days.

 

[techwanabe]

I usually consider the recommended specs a better place to start and then try to beat those by a margin. I would never use the minimum as a reference. The recommended is 800 mhz and 128 mb RAM, to which I have 1.33 ghz and 512 mb RAM. That is what makes me think the video card could be better. My Radeon has double the mininum RAM, so I'd imagine it is only at "recommended" levels so it must be the bottle neck. Unless you really need to be double the recommended CPU speed too.

One area I notice some jerkyness is when I rotate the view... it isn't smooth, but rather is somewhat a framewise rotation. I might have though that is the way it works, but a friend with a P4 2.4 ghz commended on it. BTW, he has a GF4MX video card... which is the slow/crippled version - probably not light speed ahead of mine.