I have Windows 7 64bit, Radeon 5870, Intel Core 2 Duo E8500, and 4GBs of ram, but the game stutters like there is no tomorrow. It's the worst when outdoors. For instance when entering the city for the first time the frame rate is all over the place. With vsync off, the game will oscillate between around 35-120fps. With vsync, on it's the same kind of deal but with 60fps instead of 120. It's strange. It's like it has the potential to run at a high frame rate, but doesn't.

I would love to play this game. But it would be a lot more fun if I could focus on the world and not how badly the game stutters. This seriously hampers the general immersion and enjoyment of the game.

Hi. This could be many things, one of which being your soundcard and drivers, which you don't mention experiemnting with. Anyway, start with this checklist:

1. Check you did everything in the installation guide.
2. Check you have the latest sound and video drivers.
3. Turn off catalst AI or turn to standard.
4. Disable shiny water in the ingame settings.
5. Change the sound settings ingame to use Miles or Rad.
6. In nwnplayer.ini (in your nwn folder, it opens with notepad), change or add the line Max Memory Usage=128. Also change or add the line Client CPU Affinity=0 or Client CPU Affinity=1 (just not -1 which is the default).

Good luck :)

The shiny water always slows me down. And it lags the game suddenly when it loads.

Just saying because it may be the problem. But also the whole Core Affinity thing might fix it up too.

Prevailing wisdom seems to be the shiny water option is just flat out broken.

Thanks a lot for the advice guys. I can't say for sure if my stuttering is gone, but it has at least taken a few tentative steps back and gone in to temporary hiding. The list in the original response was especially helpful. I'm not sure which elements in the list had what effect as I applied them all as one complete package, from fresh installation to first start.

One thing I did notice was the sound. I have an X-Fi XtremeGamer using the latest drivers from creative's official website. Using ALchemy, I am able to completely restore EAX (positional sound is so nice...I miss you Direct Sound 3D. May someone find a good replacement for you soon). Whenever I enabled hardware sound and eax the game actually seemed to play smoother. Using any kind of other audio, including the recommended Miles and Rad audio options actually increased the stuttering.

Again, I'm not sure if the stuttering is gone even with using hardware sound. It definitely isn't as severe, but it steel feels somewhat persistent. I will have to try some experimentation before I can turn in a final verdict.

In the meantime, what is a normal amount of stuttering for this game? Does everyone get at least some hiccups and loads?

There's always some stuttering, no matter what kind of system you have.
When new elements or creatures appear, there's a brief pause when they're loaded into memory.
Same could happen with "new" spell effects or such.

I don't know much about Win7 but I've heard NWN has issues with some dual core machines. It runs fine on my rig, but you could try disabling one of your cores. NWN doesn't need that kind of processing speed anyway. And try running it as in XP compatibility mode.

I don't know what the hell happened, but installing the "Critical Rebuild" patch (The only one that would work was the "Hordes of the Underdark" patch) and doing everything as described in the Bioware forums and on this thread made things much worse for me. The stuttering became twice as bad, and instead of restoring ANY incomplete files, when I play the game, several models are actually missing now. For example, in the Kingmaker intro, only two characters out of the whole siege party are visible (the ratman and some other guy).

{EDIT}
Ok, so here's what happened. Through trial and error, I found that turning OFF Catalyst AI caused a whole bunch of character models to disappear during gameplay. When I turned AI back on, the models reappeared. As for CPU Affinity, I found that turning on CPU Affinity for ALL four cores on my machine (Phenom II X4) actually cured the stuttering and slowframe problems, when used with the "Miles 2D Sound" option.

My only problem now is that all "non cutscene" movies won't play. That is to say, they aren't visible, even though I can hear their audio track.

Sorry to necro this thread, but I was having the exact same problem & my rig (AMD FX-8350, Radeon RX480 8GB, 32GB of RAM) is obviously way over what this game could possibly need.

Anyway, changing all graphic settings & going to very low resolutions made no difference, but as soon as I went from the RAD Sound driver to the Miles Driver, the stuttering instantly disappeared completely. From what I read on the thread this wouldn't have solved the OP's stuttering, but it may prove useful for anyone else who comes here looking for a solution.