Neverwinter Nights is getting weird FPS drops for me whenever I walk around exploring (especially if in catacombs like area) and especially if I get into a combat situation where theres 5 or more characters on screen (my character included and companions included) and if theres a really large group of of enemies or many spells being throw around it drops to an unplayable FPS rate rendering me mostly useless.

guessing by what I see, it looks like it mostly lags during the loading of textures/npcs/effects.

Already tuned off shiny water which was stated to cause problems. that didnt help. and there weren't any water in those regions anyway.

so I figured its a lighting issue, so I turned down all the lightning and shadows to minimum yet I still get this problem.

figured I'll drop all graphical settings to a minimum - still getting problems.

followed the troubleshoot steps, cleared my override, nothing I did seems to help.

I know my computer isn't exactly great but I highly doubt it should have any problem with a 2003 game.

CPU:E6600 (2.6Ghz dual core)
GPU:8800GT
RAM:2GB DDR2

Any ideas?

If You are a Windows user this might help:

From pcgamingwiki

"Dual-core or multi-core processors

NWN was not meant to run with more than one core. If you have a multi-core system, you can set the game to run on only one core. To do this, open Task Manager [Ctrl+Shift+Esc:-)] with NWN open, rightclick nwmain.exe, and click Set Affinity. If it gives you an error, click the button "Show Processes from All Users" at the bottom. In the Affinity window, make sure only one CPU is checked. You can experiment to see which core gives you the best performance.

To avoid having to do this every time you play the game, open nwnplayer.ini in the main NWN folder. Locate "Client CPU Affinity" and change the value to 1 (or whatever other core you determined gave you the best performance in the first step)."

It seems playing with core-affinities didnt help. Still getting these slowdowns

Another try [this one is from Bioware forum]:

1. Set -> compatibility mode windows xp sp2.
2. Disable sound in the configure menu -> check performance without sound.
3. Enable sound -> check performance with sound.

When you're getting slowdowns are also long script-running areas. Are your FPS actually going down? Or is the game stuttering? Graphically, you might be showing 60 fps, but it might only look like you're getting 2 if it's stopping the game, thinking, and then starting again.

If your actual graphical FPS are not going down and you used to have overrides and/or haks and you removed them, then I would recommend uninstalling and resinstalling. Occasionally, haks and overrides can have strange lasting effects, even when they're removed. I have never heard of anyone who had a reason this happens, but I've heard it happens.

Your computer is just fine for running the game smoothly, btw. Don't worry about that aspect.


EDIT: I did some brain-grinding and I think that it really might drop the graphical FPS when it's stuck in some long scripts, too. So, my recommendation, if you had a bunch of overrides and haks, would be the reinstall. Go ahead and keep your saved games and characters, though. You may wish to install in a different location just to be sure you're not linking some old files that are left-overs from the uninstall.

FYI Shadows slow my FPS down.

Had same problem (stuttering in combat situation where theres 5 or more characters on screen) and this worked for me.
Thx!

Sorted!

Thanks to everyone who's helped me pinpoint the error and thanks to GOG for taking time out on a sunday to help!

Turns out that Open GL is broken in the latest ATI Radeon Beta Drivers (the ones im using), so i decided to drop back to 13.1 and guess what?

Yes, it works perfectly!

Yay!

Anyway, if you are having issues and you are running ATI beta drivers, try non-beta drivers, worked for me!

Thanks again everyone!

I'm finding my frame rates are not all that bad in singleplayer, but in [s]multiplayer[/s] higher poly tilesets things slow considerably.

Hi, could you tell me what version numbers all your drivers are?
I am at loss with game stuttering so I thought I would give this a shot, but my Catalyst already is 13.1.
My 2D driver version is 8.01.01.1278, Direct3D version is 9.14.10.0945 and OpenGL version is 6.14.10.12002.

Meh, I still wasn't able to get it working. The game is unplayable the way it runs for me. My FPS doesn't drops, though, it's low constantly.
In start menu it runs fine, but as soon as I select module (any), it becoems noticable, but it is bearable in menu and it gets worse when game starts.
I tried renaming the executable, I tried to disable sound, I tried to mess with AA and other setting in AMD Visual Engine Control Center, I tried to thread it to different core, I tried using lowest details, windowed mode, run it through map creator and maybe even something else I can't recall right now.
Could someone offer some other advice how to get it run properly?

I've got Win 7 64-bit and Radeon Sapphire HD 6850 graphic card.

I've had the same problem and none of these fixes worked for me.
I had framerate hovering around 5-20fps, mostly when there's other people/mobs around.
To fix my low FPS I had to disable the shiny water option in Advanced Video Options.

Video Options > Advanced Video Options > Untick 'Enable Shiny Water'

My fps went from 5-20fps up to 60-90fps.
Hope this helps for anyone else having the same problem.

Note: I'm running Windows 8.1 with an AMD Radeon HD 5700 graphics card.

I'm using an AMD Radeon 7950 and Windows 8.1 (Catalyst 13.12) and an AMD 8350 CPU, well in scenes such as the scripted intro scene of the Witche's Wake (module that's included with the Platinum edition) the FPS dropped to a slideshow.

It helped to select Miles 2D Positional Audio in Sound Options, then the FPS went up to normal. By normal I mean playable, with the occasional stutter (though that is a problem with the game engine, I think)

Playing this 10+ year old game on a modern GPU is very disappointing. While other games from that era and even newer run so fast it makes me giggle with glee, this one... meh it seems to manage 50-60.

This version of the Aurora engine was really not a well made piece of software engineering. Looks like the effort of a shareware game of today. Disappointing, but at least it runs.

I've found that disabling desktop composition completely eliminated the unbearable lag on my installation (Windows 7 Pro 64-bit).