I recently downloaded BG2 to my new laptop, and it's running very poorly. At first I had strange graphical anomalies during combat. That was solved by checking a box in the graphics options section. Afterwards, though, the game developed a new issue, namely that the frame rate comes to a standstill whenever there is a lot of action on the screen, particularly from casting spells or combat with many participants.

I've read a bit about this elsewhere, and it seems that modern NVIDIA graphics cards have trouble running old Infinity Engine games like BG2. Some people have been able to fix their problems by turning off hardware acceleration (which I honestly don't understand). Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to do that on my Windows 7 laptop.

Can anyone shed any light on this problem? Is it possible to achieve a decent frame rate while playing BG2 on a modern computer?

I may have found a solution to the problem. Turning off hardware acceleration *seems* to get rid of lag caused by spells and other large animations. To do that, I took the following steps:

1. Download DirectX SDK. The following is a link for the download of the latest version. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3021d52b-514e-41d3-ad02-438a3ba730ba
2. Install the program
3. In your start menu, under programs, find DirectX SDK.
4. Open that folder. Inside the folder is another folder called DirectX Utilities. In that folder is a program called DirectX Control Panel. Start it.
5. In the Control Panel, go to the Direct Draw tab. There should be a box labeled Hardware Acceleration, and it should be checked. Uncheck the box, and click Apply.
6. Play BG2, hopefully without lag!
7. Recheck the box when you are done. I'm not sure what affect running other programs without hardware acceleration on would have, but I'd rather not find out.

NOTE: I've only tested this fix for lag in the opening cutscene of the game, but it definitely removed the lag. I'll play through more of it and see if it stays smooth, but I think this should solve the problem.

EDIT: I've played through a good chunk of Chapter 1 now, and I'm still lag free! If you're having frame rate problems running BG2 on a newer computer, I think this is your solution.

I'm still getting significant lag when I save games, press TAB (either in the spellbooks or in the rooms to find boxes/chests etc highlighted).....and at other odd occasions. Also the mouse keeps fading in and out, it's rather annoying. Is there any solution for this? The framerate itself is better now, yet the other problems still abound (enough to make me just want to install the old CD version of BGII on my laptop and play it there instead).....

It doesn't seem like anyone on the internet has done this but here's what I did:

in bgconfig
set to use windowed mode (yeah sucks but whatever)
I set my resolution to 1024x768 (it's under the "unsupported" list)
turn on 3d acceleration and all that good stuff

I did this on my macbook pro (aka nvidia gfx card) and it worked perfectly in windows xp. should work on windows 7 too.

Doesn't work for Windows 7, at least not for me. TAB, saving games, etc still causes the game to lag.

This is what I did to fix the lag believe it or not, go in to configuration and turn General, Graphics and sound all the way up. That might work for you, it did for me.

It's a long shot but have you tried turning Automated Speed Adjustment off? It is on the Basic>Hardware tab in BGconfig. Perhaps the game does not recognize the VGA and cuts back on the performance too much.

BG2 HATES, HATES, HATES using 3D acceleration. I'm not sure why, but it hated using it even back when the game was new. The game simply looks better when it's off, too, so disabling that should help. I've never had any issue running BG2 on any of my machines. (I'm using Win7 64-bit at the moment.)

In the BGConfig panel:
Basic - Hardware: 3D Acceleration off, Automated Speed on, other settings maxed
Graphics - Display: 2D Color Depth 32-bit (I run at 800/600 fullscreen for the oldschool look)
Graphics - 2D&3D: Use 3D animations yes, Use 3D Acceleration no

Ingame:
Color Depth: 32
Transparent Shadows: yes
The Software BLT options should be automatically disabled.

This worked great for myself! Thank you so much!

Um I did the suggestions and now I have black squares popping up around my characters making it so that you can't see the background. I used the mod that allows smooth transition from bg1 to bg2 and you access bg1 from the bg2 icon. Any help would be much appreciated. Interestingly enough is that the framerate problem that I had has disappeared.

So I had massive frame rate problems when casting spells and looked to this thread.

I however had hardware 3D acceleration turned off by default.

I then turned it ON and is now working fine. This is with an i5 2500k and GTX 460.

this helped me when I experienced the same problems. wonderful solution!