NWN2, pondering whether to buy

Gumble Tinkertumble · Post by **Gumble Tinkertumble** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 1:18 pm

Okay, so I have used the Windows Game Advisor and found that my PC at home can run the game. However, it only has a 1.4 GHz processor, so I am not sure I entirely trust the game advisor.

So, what are the absolute bare minimum specs you need to run the game? Has anyone tried something lower than the recommended min specs? What was it like?

Silverdragonams · Post by **Silverdragonams** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 1:55 pm

The box says you need a P4, 2.4 GHz minimum. A lot of people are complaining that the game runs rather slow even on high end machines, but, it's also my understanding that much of that has to do with graphics cards rather than processor.

My suggestion: If you are just going to buy it now so you can play the OC, don't bother. The OC isn't worth the $50. You might as well wait until Avlis 2 is ready.

If you're more interested in building your own mods, then go for it. The toolset will probably do just fine on you computer.

Thalarian Arc'Thass · Post by **Thalarian Arc'Thass** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 2:02 pm

Silverdragonams wrote: My suggestion: If you are just going to buy it now so you can play the OC, don't bother. The OC isn't worth the $50.

mmh, I disagree and found the OC very entertaining- although I only had time to play the first 10 hours or so.

Aerill · Post by **Aerill** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 2:15 pm

I also have to disagree about OC. It's really good for the most part. I have serious doubts about NWN2 running at a playable speed on 1.4 GHz processor though. Maybe if you have a super video card..

Silverdragonams · Post by **Silverdragonams** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 2:15 pm

The first 2 acts were good, I agree with that.

Raine Jueness · Post by **Raine Jueness** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 2:16 pm

From what I've read, the OC is rather linear and skewed towards a LG playstyle. Those are the biggest criticisms of the campaign. While you can play other personalities, you won't really be happy with it unless you conform to the designers' player concept. In general people like NWN2's OC much better than NWN's.

rshampshire · Post by **rshampshire** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 2:27 pm

I'm running the following system now,

2.4GHz Intel P4
512Mb Ram
GeForce 7600GS with 512Mb Ram Graphics.

Now, I know I have some issues with this, I need more Ram and a meatier PSU for the graphics card but in general this runs ok.

Load times are a bit slow and I get the odd hang when theres loads of magic (I'm guessing that this is because the new Graphics needs 400W rather than the 250W I'm feeding it) but other then that no problem.

tizmo · Post by **tizmo** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 3:23 pm

rshampshire wrote:I'm running the following system now,

2.4GHz Intel P4
512Mb Ram
GeForce 7600GS with 512Mb Ram Graphics.

Now, I know I have some issues with this, I need more Ram and a meatier PSU for the graphics card but in general this runs ok.

Load times are a bit slow and I get the odd hang when theres loads of magic (I'm guessing that this is because the new Graphics needs 400W rather than the 250W I'm feeding it) but other then that no problem.

Load times are mostly based upon the amount of system RAM you have. The jittery screen or odd hang would be due to video or possibly network issues.. but damn that's a good video card. I would agree, you need a larger PSU. If you go buy a new PSU, get one from either CoolerMaster or Antec. They cost a bit more, but are a lot more quiet and more reliable!

My $0.02
Tizmo

rshampshire · Post by **rshampshire** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 3:34 pm

tizmo wrote:
rshampshire wrote:I'm running the following system now,

2.4GHz Intel P4
512Mb Ram
GeForce 7600GS with 512Mb Ram Graphics.

Now, I know I have some issues with this, I need more Ram and a meatier PSU for the graphics card but in general this runs ok.

Load times are a bit slow and I get the odd hang when theres loads of magic (I'm guessing that this is because the new Graphics needs 400W rather than the 250W I'm feeding it) but other then that no problem.
Load times are mostly based upon the amount of system RAM you have. The jittery screen or odd hang would be due to video or possibly network issues.. but damn that's a good video card. I would agree, you need a larger PSU. If you go buy a new PSU, get one from either CoolerMaster or Antec. They cost a bit more, but are a lot more quiet and more reliable!

My $0.02
Tizmo

The card is all the more amazing since it's AGP. I know, I know.... AGP is obsolete, but I didn't have the money to buy a whole new system just so I could get a PCI-e board.

PlasmaJohn · Post by **PlasmaJohn** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 3:35 pm

The irony is that while NVidia's 7x00 series supports SM3.0, it doesn't have the horsepower to deal with the load placed on it by NWN2. This is why some of their older cards seem to deal with NWN2 better. FWIW, there seems to be a lot of "piston-slap" in the implementation. So the only hope for those of us who own 7x00 cards is for Obsidian to tighten up their slop or give us a means of downshifting to the shader impelementation used by the less capable cards.

The comment about system RAM is spot-on. The Aurora engine (NWN) is horribly memory and disk-bound. Electron (NWN2) also suffers from that as they didn't really tinker all that much with that part of the code. You really want 1Gb of RAM as a bare minimum and I'd highly recommend 2 or even 4 if you can afford it and your motherboard supports it. Going beyond 4Gb won't do anything for NWN2.

Tangleroot · Post by **Tangleroot** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 3:53 pm

Raine Jueness wrote:From what I've read, the OC is rather linear and skewed towards a LG playstyle. Those are the biggest criticisms of the campaign. While you can play other personalities, you won't really be happy with it unless you conform to the designers' player concept. In general people like NWN2's OC much better than NWN's.

I'm playing a chaotic evil warlock with no trouble.

The campaign beats NWN's any day of the week too. Lots of combat and dungeon crawling, but that's fine by me.

Gumble Tinkertumble · Post by **Gumble Tinkertumble** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 4:15 pm

Well, seeing as its not going to break the bank, I might just buy it for the sake of having it and give it a go (and look at building a new PC, heheh) Thanks for all the enlightenment.

Talwin Hawkins · Post by **Talwin Hawkins** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 5:10 pm

I run it on an

Athlon 2000 (1.6ghz)
Radeon 9600xt
1gb generic ram

I run it on its lowest settings and its runs fine. I can turn up some of the things and it runs ok. *shrugs* if you have a similar machine you may get similar results.

drunkenpig · Post by **drunkenpig** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 5:49 pm

Talwin Hawkins wrote:I run it on an

Athlon 2000 (1.6ghz)
Radeon 9600xt
1gb generic ram

I run it on its lowest settings and its runs fine. I can turn up some of the things and it runs ok. *shrugs* if you have a similar machine you may get similar results.

Running on its lowest settings is key. And running at a low resolution like 800x600 will help. My native resolution is 1680x1050 and NWN2 is very laggy at that resolution, but when I run it at 800x600 is runs fine.

Istahire · Post by **Istahire** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 6:19 pm

Most of the complaints about high system demands have been due to people expecting the game to run at full graphics with their medicore hardware.

With graphics turned down, I could play the game fairly well on my laptop with an old ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (128MB), 1024MB RAM and 1,7GHz CPU.

Talwin Hawkins · Post by **Talwin Hawkins** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 6:28 pm

drunkenpig wrote:
Talwin Hawkins wrote:I run it on an

Athlon 2000 (1.6ghz)
Radeon 9600xt
1gb generic ram

I run it on its lowest settings and its runs fine. I can turn up some of the things and it runs ok. *shrugs* if you have a similar machine you may get similar results.
Running on its lowest settings is key. And running at a low resolution like 800x600 will help. My native resolution is 1680x1050 and NWN2 is very laggy at that resolution, but when I run it at 800x600 is runs fine.

1024x800 here. not THAT low.

Gumble Tinkertumble · Post by **Gumble Tinkertumble** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 9:37 am

Right, well I have an AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM and an NVidia FX5200 (can't remember how much memory). I'll check it out as soon as I can and let everyone know how it runs. Should be fairly easy for me to upgrade to 1GB RAM if need be. Heck, it'll make everything else run better anyway.

Klazaroth · Post by **Klazaroth** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 1:06 pm

NVidia FX5200 ... you might actually be out of luck there. NWN2 is very unforgiving when it comes to anything unsupported.

NWN2 I find is a great game, I like it a lot more then the original. The gameplay and the graphics( even at lowest settings) are breath taking. But I must admit, I had 512 ram when I got the game and was pretty much forced to upgrade to 1gb to make the game enjoyable. I'd say the recommended requirements are the minimum specs if you want to get the most out of NWN2.

Just if it helps, my laptop specs are:
Core Duo 1.66ghz
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 256MB
1 GB Ram

Game runs smoothly on:
1280x800
All texture options on medium
Shadows low <- (biggest performance killer)

Post by **RCon** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 1:26 pm

I found performance to be great once the areas are loaded, but transitioning between areas (which is usually 10 seconds or less on NWN/Avlis) can be upwards of a minute or two on NWN2. Running on a Dell E1705 dual core laptop with 1 GB of RAM, NVidia 7800 video card.

SplankNon · Post by **SplankNon** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 2:49 pm

RCon wrote:I found performance to be great once the areas are loaded, but transitioning between areas (which is usually 10 seconds or less on NWN/Avlis) can be upwards of a minute or two on NWN2. Running on a Dell E1705 dual core laptop with 1 GB of RAM, NVidia 7800 video card.

What doesn't help is that the OC is split into quite so many modules. And also, I notice on every area load, that approximately half the progress bar is for dealing with "Area Updates", Phases One and Two. Its name seems to imply that it's effecting changes to the area, based on quests and scripts and suchlike - might this not be a factor, then, in an online and persistant module which doesn't do changes like that? If so, the load times would be halved.

_JM_ · Post by **_JM_** » Wed Jan 17, 2007 11:44 pm

I can vouch that the FX 5200 doesn't work so well. On my system NWN2 runs badly and looking at people's posted PC specs (specifically rshampshire's) that would seem to be the problem.

(same system memory (512MB), faster processor (p4 2.8 rather than p4 2.4), but a FX 5200 128MB rather than 7600 512MB)

Li'll Divvil · Post by **Li'll Divvil** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 12:48 am

Loading times are my biggest issue so far.

I play on a laptop, acer coreduo 2Ghz, 2Gb ram, ATI x1600 256 Mb ddr3 (512 Mb with the hypermemory option).

I do play on lowest settings but at an optimal resolution for my laptopscreen so I guess I should not complain. I haven't optimized yet though.