NWN not running properly

[ImOnABoat]

Hi,

A call out to all you NWN experts out there. I've got an almost brand new computer with 4 gigs of ram, Intel's Q9550 processor and Radeon's HD 4870 GPU, but NWN isn't running properly. I can play, but the game keeps doing these small "lag spike" type hangups for 0.1-0.5 seconds every 2-4 seconds or so.

I've tried messing around with the Client CPU Affinity property, and I've tried different resolutions and setting the graphic options to low, mid and high settings.

My GPU's drivers are relatively new, so I doubt there has been any NWN related changes, but that's pretty much the only thing I can think of anymore. Any other suggestions?

Oh and I'm running a 64-bit XP Professional, that's another thing I thought might have something to do with this.

[BringOutYourDead]

I've had a similar problem before when I was still running a Windows 2K system. For me, it was triggered if I alt-tabbed out of NWN and then switched back in. I had no idea what caused or what to do to fix it, even a hard drive reformatting didn't fix the problem. But, strangely, when I did a system restore to some obscure date, it fixed the problem. Occasionally, the problem would come back but doing a system restore to one or two days back fixed it again. This gave me the idea that it's somehow related to the general state of your system.

The only other suggestion that I have in mind is to revert to an older vid card driver. NWN's a fairly old game, after all, and on a couple of different cards, I've noticed that using older driver's produce better results.

[IxTheSpeedy]

I have also found that the newest driver for my card caused issues with NWN.  You're running a 64-bit XP box which is a slightly odd OS as far as drivers are concerned.

[ExileStrife]

64-bit XP is a kinda shaky platform and is nowhere near as polished as is 64-bit Vista.  While your problem could come from any number of things, that would honestly be the first thing I'd consider.

For what it's worth, I'm using 64-bit Vista, a 4870 Radeon, and an 8500 Intel.  Only NWN problem I have is that the rate at which my camera rotates changes in each area I go to (sometimes normal, sometimes slow, sometimes really fast!).

[ImOnABoat]

I've been hoping to be able to skip the whole Vista era and jump straight to Windows 7. I've got the beta version installed at the moment, so I suppose I could try how NWN runs on it (if it still works since the 7 RC is coming up).

Thanks for all the advices. Unfortunately using older video card drivers isn't an option as I play newer games too.  What baffles me is that I have zero problems with other games (even old ones like Warcraft 3). I might try a clean Windows install though.

[IxTheSpeedy]

If you do go for a new XP install, I would suggest going with 32-bit.  No reason to go with 64-bit really unless you need to use more than 2 gigs of contiguous memory for one application.  Highly unlikely unless you are doing video or large image editing.

Nothing wrong with skipping Vista.  I'm actually about to downgrade myself from Vista back to XP 32-bit for my gaming box.  Of course all I play is NWN these days...