Things you may try:

- switching to windowed mode, to see if there's any change
- disabling shiny water under in-game options
- changing rendering settings to Performance in NV Control Panel

Has this been fixed yet? Cloaks, robes, and ranged weapons still drop me 150fps (literally).

It's not shiny water. It's the 400 and up series Nvidia cards and OpenGL- specifically robes, ranged weapons, and cloaks.

lol, me too. For once, we are the performance champions!

I know about the problem you are having and there is a bug in OpenGL on newer NVidia Cards. I made a simplified installation script that ignores some parts in OpenGL rendering.

This is NOT a solution, simply a workaround until NVidia gets their minds to actually fix this bug. This workaround gives me 30-60 fps on my GTX470. I hope it works for you as well. NVidia driver version 275.33

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Other.Detail&id=208426&id=1500

Best Regards
Nick

We could use something like this for the ATI cards :)

@Arthandas

The patch overrides some OpenGL settings using a debug wrapper. This may also work for ATI if you ignore the Nvidia settings part.

Could you try it and please comment?
If it works using default or specific ATI catalyst settings, could you please print screen and send them to me? That way I can update the patch for both Nvidia and ATI.

Best Regards
Nick

Okay, I'm kind of in hot water here with my son; silly me for updating to Win7 from WinXP without thinking that NWN might not run properly, but there we are:

I was wondering what this CPU Affinity fix is. I tried looking/editing my NWNPLAYER.INI file and got this:

[Game Options]
Memory Level=1
Memory Access=1
TooltipDelay uSec=100000
Enable FloatyTextFeedback=1
Hide SecondStoryTiles=0

[Control Options]
Zoom Speed=3.000000
CameraTurnSpeed=1.000000
Enable ScreenEdgeCameraTurn=1

[Profile]
ShowMessageOfTheDay=1
Client Port=5120


Where do I adjust it so that we don't have uber-laggy 1 player graphics. this game played VERY well on the WinXP version but has a 10 FPS in solo on Win 7.
Here's system specs:

2.66GHz Intel Pentium D
3GB Ram
MSI/ATI Radeon R4350
Win 7 (32 Bit)

I tried that OpenGL workaround but have NO clue WTH I'm doing so didn't mess with it beyond installing it in the NWN folder.

Thanks in advance for any help; I'm going to go to bed before I solve all our problems by smashing the computer and becoming Amish :)

I apologize for bumping this thread (especially since I didn't buy the game from GoG -- though I'm thinking about doing so just so I'll also have a downloadable copy in case my discs ever die) but I've been searching all over the Internet and I guess this is still the best site for us to ever get any hope of any sort of fix.

First of all, to clarify for some, the problem lies in the nVidia drivers more than anything else. They simply aren't handling OpenGL from games like this the same as they used to. If you downgrade to some really old drivers (I think in the 76.something range wasn't it?) the game will run blazingly fast. Of course, such old drivers won't work with modern videocards, so we're pretty much screwed in that respect. I'm thinking about playing around with linux solutions or something however. Bioware actually still cared about their customers back when they made this game and decided even to make the game multi-platform, so it actually has a linux client even. Perhaps a built-in non-official driver might work better or something. I'll have to play around with it later on and see I guess.

ATI's problem is that nVidia basically owned OpenGL before this game was made (which is kind of dirty since OpenGL was supposed to be relatively device independent) and ATI has focus on Direct3D primarily pretty much since they started getting serious about 3D acceleration anyway, so basically ATI users are screwed kind of by default. (Ironically, for a while there the problem swung the other way when games started going more and more Direct3D and being poorly optimized such that some actually ran really badly on nVidia cards.) I always found it funny that my last ATI card, an X850XT-PE, which was just an absolute beast of a card which could plow through even running massively inefficient and complex SM 2.0 effects designed to emulate SM 3.0 effects like HDR while still running FSAA and AF in later really inefficient games like Oblivion would drag to a screeching halt the moment I stepped out of the inn or whatever at the start of most NWN modules and saw the outside for the first time. (Though I guess it must be a little of the same problem because a very very long time ago I played NWN on a Radeon 9600 Pro at 1024x768 with at least somewhat decent quality settings and while the game could crash from time to time in some really rough areas, it was overall very playable. This was a far older version of the game long before 1.67+ however.)

Ironically, onboard chipsets most likely just do well simply because they don't implement a lot of stuff that even such an old game uses (how they can still be so far behind is beyond me) and you of course use generally lower quality settings anyway.

@Niklars1
"This is NOT a solution, simply a workaround until NVidia gets their minds to actually fix this bug."
NVidia will not fix this issue. Period. You can e-mail them, beg them, even threaten them, but it's not going to happen. They've demonstrated to us on numerous occasions that they do not care in the least about any game older than some two years or so and if you don't like it, too bad. (You can actually find numerous instances of them ignoring even simple problems with older games -- the Thief I & II games probably being the best examples -- simply because they just don't care. ATI has always been better about this much at least.) Always fun to see a manufacturer care so much about their customers. Anyway, it would be a bad idea to count on nVidia ever fixing this. It's not going to happen, so any non-solution workaround basically IS very likely the closest we'll ever get to a solution because it's the ONLY solution. Sadly, it seems it doesn't really work for at least myself and I believe others as well.

It does occur to me that theoretically it MIGHT be possible for GoG to contact nVidia if they really wanted and get them to come up with some sort of modified OpenGL.dll or something just for this game. (It strikes me that, ironically enough, what we need here may well be something like those Glide wrappers, only for OpenGL.) Theoretically. They still probably wouldn't do it, but our only hope is if someone could somehow convince GoG to do this so the game will actually be playable on modern systems as is supposed to be the purpose of this site's releases. NVidia really doesn't care about the end-users of the actual hardware itself, but they will listen to developers, publishers (and hopefully by extension distributers,) and etc sometimes. Unfortunately, I have no idea how anyone might even convince GoG to do this. (I will say though, if they were to do it and successfully get some sort of solution, I would probably actually be willing to buy the game from here just to support their efforts in getting the game running smoothly on modern hardware. I really miss this game, but a majority of modules are basically unusable short of some MAJOR modifications of those modules -- and of course premium modules have some sort of encryption in the real module data hidden in their hak file that prevents any editing.) In other words, unequipping all robes from all NPCs is basically not going to happen.


Anyway, I did try that patch. I even threw in those overrides that are supposed to disable stuff like the ranged weapon strings and such. I still can get 14 or even as low as 11 FPS in some really relatively simple scenes. I've already lowered quality settings a decent amount, turned off shiny water and advanced visual effects. At this point it's actually worse looking than it was on that Radeon 9600 Pro (where at least I could use the "shiny water." It really gets on my nerves that this system is at least tough enough to manage a newer game like Alice: Madness Returns with decently high video settings AND PhysX on max (which means the GPU isn't just processing the video, but also the physics) and the ONLY thing that ever lowers the FPS in any noticeable manner is if I fire the pepper gun for a long time (something about the smoke effect causes it to slow down.) Everything else -- even when the PhysX is dealing with a lot of flying shards of broken things or whatever -- runs smoothly on that game. You know there's something horribly wrong when a system that can do all of that can't just force its way through anything in a game this old that causes slowdowns by sheer brute force of modern processing power versus the cards this game used to run so great on. I still remember basically maxing everything out on an overclocked Athlon 2600+ Mobile and a Geforce 6800 vanilla. I imagine this system is a lot more than twice as powerful as that one was...

I really miss NWN. If anyone might have any ideas of anything else to try I'd be willing to give them a shot within reason. (I'm not downgrading my PC or anything like that.) I really don't want to play this game at < 15 FPS outside of tiny mostly empty rooms, nor do I really want to play it with textures and everything on settings so low that it looks worse than an integrated GPU can probably run it today.


EDIT: Oh, btw, the "Client CPU Affinity" parameter should be under [Game Options] near the top of the nwnplayer.ini file in the game's folder -- it should have been automatically created by the original patching process, though I have no idea how GoG is distributing it exactly. If it's not there, you could try adding it (it won't hurt anything, but if somehow the game is missing that update or something it might not do anything.) Just add Client CPU Affinity=1 or whatever right under [Game Options] and you should be fine.

Just as a heads up, the version of this thread found on the nvidia forums has recently been updated to say that the next driver update (mid-late July) does include the fix for this problem. So hang tight! Help is on the way!

There's a beta release v280.19 available now, and it has solved the problem for me (GTX570).

I can confirm this. Not only NWN but many more opengl games run alot better with those. Seems from the notes they reintegrated full OpenGL support.

Cheer!³

I too can confirm this. Newest beta drivers from Nvidia has fixed the frame rate issues in this game.

Sadly, I can't get the latest nVidia drivers (from 275 on up) to install at all no matter what I do, so I guess I'll never know about how well the game can run on a good videocard. I've tried all I could think of and all it ever does is just say "failed" and refuse to even give me a partial install (it actually goes and uninstalls right behind itself.) I've googled around and tried various tricks, but no good so far. Guess I'm pretty screwed not just on this game but probably future games for now until I can figure that out. It bugs me even more because there's now a WHQL 280 driver (280.61 or something, I forget the exact number.) I don't know how something with such a low quality installer gets certified by anyone (I'm not the only one having this very problem with these newer drivers. All of the people with the problem are still able to install older versions that didn't install quite the same way.)

In the meantime, it seems it does run ok on ATI cards these days. I remember it dragging to an absolute crawl on my old X850XT-PE some time ago, but now I can run the game on an HD5570 on my minimal PC without it crashing. I still have to disable shaders (shiny water) and lower a couple of things, but the lowest FPS I've gotten was around 15 or so. (Which is bad, but it won't crash at least.) Normally it runs at least 30 (sometimes nearly 60) on this card. Not so bad for the low end card on a game that is extremely ATI-unfriendly anyway.


EDIT: Correction. I managed to find a way to trick the drivers into installing against all of their resistance. Now I'm running 280.26 WHQL. Framerates are definitely MUCH better, but it seems like the same places that drag that 5570 down drag even my GTX 460 down. At times it's pretty close to the same framerates -- albeit with maximum possible settings on the GTX 460 at least (including pixel shaders.) It's still a bit above even on those times, and of course this is with higher quality settings, but it's still surprising that a modern videocard of this level can't do at least as well as, say, a Geforce 6800 (non-ultra) did way back when this game was still alive. Oh well. Just a reminder of how bad video drivers are IMO. In many places I easily get > 60 FPS though, so overall this is a HUGE improvement over the way it was.