HG Enhanced - Killing gameplay speed

[olarus]

Hey everyone,

Before I begin, I want to say I've been playing HG for the last 3 days without any problems. I enjoyed the mod quite a bit, so I decided to download HG Enhanced (mainly for the new descriptions, but also because I felt it was the right thing to do to truly experience the mod).

So, I installed HG Enhanced earlier this afternoon and started up NWN. Immediately I noticed performance issues. When I moused over buttons, it would take 1-2 secs for the mouse over to take place and clicks were very slow. I committed to getting into the game, and 2 crashes later I finally got to the loading (entering mod) screen. It took a good 6-7 minutes for the mod to finish loading. When it finally did, I still had the same issues - everything was crawling.

I quit the game and uninstalled NWN (along with all the extras I had installed). I then rebooted to get on a clean slate, and then re-installed NWN/patched to 1.69. I then started up NWN and the performance issues have not gone away.

Any thoughts or suggestions are very appreciated as NWN is currently completely unplayable.

Thanks in advance,
- Olarus

[olarus]

I forgot to mention this yesterday. I also updated my machine with the latest windows updates and installed .Net 2.0. Could either of those have done this? Seems more likely since the uninstall/reinstall didn't fix this up.

I've been trying everything I can think of here with no luck. I've rolled back the video settings to the bare bones, which makes no difference. The uninstall/reinstall did not help. Rebooting the machine - nothing. I let the machine sit off overnight to see if that may help out but the issue persists. Everything is extremely slow and I can't fix this. Please, any help you can give me would be wonderful, as I'd like to be able to play NWN again.

Thanks,

- Olarus

[wodgard]

have you done any thing else but install enhanced mod.. maybe update your video drivers laitly... how was your proformance before you had this explaned trouble... do you have any touble running the singel player game.. be as specific as ya can with any thing ya installed round the same time. wether to do with nwn or not. either i or someone else better experenced will answer if ya give us the right hint... to recoginise your trouble

luck
Wodgard

[Trazik]

Have you defragged your hard drive(s) lately?

Have you updated your graphics drivers lately?

Have you eliminated the old "HotU Animation Fix"?

Do you have other overrides and haks not required for HG which might be messing things up for you?

Have you turned off shiny water?

Have you turned off skyboxes?

Maybe you could play with turning down several graphics options in succession.

[olarus]

Nov 28, 2008 15:51:05 GMT Trazik said:

Have you defragged your hard drive(s) lately?

Doing so as I write this response - sitting at 30%.

Have you updated your graphics drivers lately?

I just got this machine 3 days ago. NWN is the only piece of software I have added to the machine as well. That being said, it's possible the drivers were out of date. I'll go take a look now.

Have you eliminated the old "HotU Animation Fix"?

I have no idea what this is - I'll start searching now. Could you point me in the right direction?

Do you have other overrides and haks not required for HG which might be messing things up for you?

No.

Have you turned off shiny water?

I've tried rolling back every graphical option I could find and it makes no difference.

Have you turned off skyboxes?

Same as above.

Maybe you could play with turning down several graphics options in succession.

That's what I have been trying. I don't understand why I should have to however. I was successfully playing Higher Ground for 2 days without any performance issues before installing HG Enhanced, updating windows updates and installing .Net 2.0. One of those 3 had to have done something because I know my machine was handling things just fine before those updates.

Thanks for the pointers!

[Trazik]

HG Enhanced is very graphics intensive. A well-cooled GPU is important as are the latest graphics drivers. In my case, I use NVidia, and the last one or 2 (178+) are critical for NWN IMHO, especially if you have a 7000, 8000 or 9000 series card.

[dapperdave]

Hi Olarus,

I Seem to remember having a similar problem a while back, it happened when I installed .NET 2.0 so that might be your problem, as far as i can recall, I uninstalled and reinstalled NWN after the .NET and that solved it for me,

Cheers,

Dave

[chainlink]

Pah HG enhanced is very graphics intensive my left cheek.
I run it on a secondary machine with a Sempron 2200 and a Geforce FX5600 with no issues so I'd have to guess the .NET is the cause of your lag problems.
No matter what's been added through HG enhanced NWN is an old game with minimal CPU and GPU requirements in todays world of Dual & Quad Core processors and stupidly powerful graphics cards.

[olarus]

Thanks guys, I'll try and answer the remaining questions above.

Days 1-2: I have not installed any other mods/haks/etc for NWN. I installed the game, updated to 1.69, installed latest CEP and played the game for 2 days - no performance problems.

Day 3: I updated windows updates to SP3. I installed .Net 2.0. I installed HG Enhanced. I installed the recommended picture files that were listed on the HG Enhanced Wiki page. I then ran NWN - huge performance problems.

Day 3: I uninstalled NWN completely. I rebooted the machine. I reinstalled NWN. I updated to 1.69. I ran NWN - huge performance issues. I installed latest CEP and ran NWN - huge performance issues. Note: I no longer have HG Enhanced install as far as I know. If I need to do something further to uninstall HG Enhanced, please let me know.

Day 4: I am now Defragging my HD (47% complete). I updated my graphics driver from 6.14.10.xxxx -> 6.14.10.xxyy (last 2 numbers changed, seemed minimal). I installed the animation fix for HotU (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Hakpaks.Detail&id=251).

When the de-frag is complete, I will try running NWN again. If everything is still slow, I will uninstall .Net 2.0 and re-run NWN. I the problem persists, I will roll back SP3 -> SP2. At that point I will be at the exact place I was before installing any updates/HG Enhanced yesterday. If the problem persists, I don't what else to do at that point.

Thanks again for the help!

[Trazik]

Not all of us have multi-core processors, Chain.

[Acaos]

Reinstall your video drivers - on several of my PCs installing XP SP3 broke them with exactly the symptoms you describe (very laggy video).

Acaos

[chainlink]

Nov 28, 2008 17:15:34 GMT Trazik said:

Not all of us have multi-core processors, Chain.[/quote

That's why I said I'm running it on a Sempron 2200 with a really crappy old video card, at least for one of my secondary machines and it has zero issues with HG enhanced lagging.

[olarus]

Problem solved! Either the defrag or the updated video drivers did the trick here - I'm leaning towards the updated vid drivers myself due to a few posts above.

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate it!