NWN 2 Performace Tweaks

[Twi'lek_Dancer]

Alright, as some of you know NWN2 is giving me a headache, performance is pretty poor.

Needless to say lastest video card drivers is a must.

Here are some tweaks I've found surfing the web....

THE NVIDIA SUPER OMGWTF TWEAK! This fellow gave me 12fps FREE. O_o
The ini file for NWN2 comes DEFAULT with an ATI setting which buggers things up for NVIDIA cards.
Go to your My Documents and explore through to the NWN2 directory. You'll find a file called "NWN.INI". Open this fellow for editing.
The line you are looking for is:

ATIWorkAroundForPointLightShadows=1

Change that 1 into a 0...

IMPORTANT: Go into game. Make all your graphic changes. Apply it and then EXIT THE GAME. Everytime you edit in-game it defaults back to 1. So don't forget to change it back.

Move Draw distance to 100
Not too far and not too close, you can see enough to enjoy with the graphics card getting over whelmed by the amount of detail on the horizon.

Each gives back a decent amount of frame rates.

Gives a decent FPS improvement, due to heavy use of the GPU.

4. Install nhancer (nvidia cards)
Software allows you to configure the profiles for various games and applications. you can download it from here http://www.nhancer.com/
Once you have installed it, you need to locate the NWN2 Profile. Ensure that you add all of the executables (*.exe) from the C:\Program Files\Atari\Neverwinter Nights 2 directory to the profile.
If you do not wish to install nhancer the addition of the executables to the profiles can be added via editing the profiles under the nvidia control panel.

5. VSync and AntiAliasing
Use the NWN2 profile in nhancer and set vsync to off
Use the NWN2 profile in nhancer to set AA to application (especially that NWN2 1.03 allows you to set AA in game)

I'll add more later if I found good ones.

[ObViews]

TweakGuides.com has a collection of all this stuff. Though they tested with the beta 1.03 patch, apparently the performance with 1.03 is even better than their tests, judging from the bioware forum buzz that ensued. With that patch is supposed to come a significant increase in performance that should relieve your headache quite a bit. It gave me some headaches as it borked my whole game, but that's another matter entirely (never let a NWNUpdate patch crash, EVER).