I've recently picked up where i left off in SoU. I'm on the third level of the tower crypt in Undrentide but unless i get some tech help here, i can't see myself getting too much further. You see, my framerate is bombed out at a massive 1fps and this is about as close to unplayable as i can bear.

I'm running an Athlon 1800+ with Radeon 9200 and 1 gig RAM. This has been more than sufficient for the most part with only slight framerate drops on some of the bigger, flashier baddies. I can imagine that this particular level is pretty taxing on hardware (with all the shifting walls) but this is ridiculous. Does anyone else have trouble with this part of the game?

Some interesting background info: When last i gave up on SoU, a particularly nasty virus was holding my system to ransom. At the time i thought that the poor performance of NWN was due to the bug taxing all the resources. But 5 months, several formats and a clean system later, and i realise that it's not the case. Has anyone got any suggestions? Or does it get better once leaving the tower crypt?

[ 09-26-2005, 11:00 AM: Message edited by: Sever ]

I know exactly where you mean! There is some kind of memory leak on that level (the one with all the moving walls), the longer you remain in that area, the lower the framerate will become. My 1GB Ram, and highly overclocked Athlon 64 system also eventually reaches a crawl in that room. To solve it - either reload, or if that doens't work, restart NWN and then reload.

So it's common then? *wipes brow* I'll knuckle through it then. But it might take a while...

Thanks Zink [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

At least now I know I have that to look forward to. My system was almost identical to that before I upgraded a few months back. I am so pleased I never went through the entire campaign with my previous statistics then. I would have been wailing and gnashing my teeth if I needed to suffer through that.

If I recall the room correctly I could get better performance by simply zooming in to the max. Moving walls that arent in view dont affect performance as much (even though the room still is slow).

I think there's a couple of issue happening here:

1. ATI's horrible OpenGL support. I couldn't play NWN period with my 9600XT (which had more than enough power) until I switched to a 9800pro.

2. There is a coding error in SoU, that causes massive frame rate hits in certain errors. I thought the latest patch had fixed that though, but apparantly not.

As has been suggested previously, try different camera angles and zoom levels. Just by switching from driving to top down camera can provide as much as 15fps (in my experiments)

Also, you could try different versions of Catalyst. I've heard many people have had a lot of success by extracting the opengl.dll (?) from older catalysts and putting it in the root directory of the game, thus forcing the game to use that version of OpenGL. Check around and see what success other people have had.

Had that same problem with frame rates although not to such an extent. *Fiddling* with the graphics while playing did solve it for me - e.g. zooming in and out for some seconds or changing the camera perspectives back and forth for a short while. Judging by my system monitor (from sysinternals) this did free a lot of memory.

There's another issue there as well, any programs running in the background will cause performance hits. For single player, I generally disconnect from the internet, I'm on cable, and turn off all my online protection stuff. A lot of this game is processor intense, and the more stuff you have using resources, the laggier ( is that a word? ) it will get.

ouch! i forgot about that level. :(
that was a mean one. very very slow performance and almost impossible to negotiate, because by the time you got to where you wanted to go, your way was blocked again and you needed to find a new path.

i went thru quite a few driver versions and just never found relief. that's the one place i never lingered around picking up loot.

V***V