As the party size increases, the less FPS I have - but this only occurs when I'm selecting my main character rather than the companions (such as Neeshka). My FPS can go from 20ish to 60 just from clicking from my main character to any companion. This is during the original campaign, and now that I'm in Act 2 the FPS is awful as I have another character slot.

My laptop is a mid-range gaming, with a 840m nvidia card and a 3ghz CPU - and whilst I'm aware it's not the best, it's all I currently have at the moment - and what's annoying is that when I'm not selecting my main character the FPS is butter smooth no matter the party size.

This makes me think that it's more of an engine/backend issue rather than my laptop (even though I'm aware my laptop isn't the best).

Has anyone else encountered this before? Is there any fix available, or any tweaks I could make that could help?

I've deleted my override and still have the issue, so it's not mods. I've turned off the shadows and the problem still persists and I've also tried the NW2 client extension with no luck.

Any help would be great!

Do you get the same issue if you restart Windows, close everything else down except for the game and *essential* programs, and start the game before doing anything else?

Unfortunately yes, the problem persists. Only when controlling the main character, on my companions the gameplay is butter smooth. :(

Any suggestions? I was thinking of re-installing and seeing if that would help at all.

If you start a new game, and give yourself 4 companions with the console, does the problem persist?

Yes, it does :(

I'm going to re-download the client and keep my save and see if that helps.

Sorry to spam, but I just wanted to update in case anyone in future experiences something similar..

It was my custom portrait that was causing FPS issues for me on that one specific character. After clearing the portrait image, the FPS stabilized. Weird bug.

Did you use the same custom portrait when you tested with a new game?

Yes, when I created a character I selected a portrait too and had an FPS slowdown, but only for that specific character. For some reason it hogged A LOT of resources; the difference between having the portrait and not is like night and day.

What an odd bug. I have a pile of custom portraits in .tga and they're all no larger than 301 kb. What size is yours?