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NWN Installed-- but it's slooooow


Lord Kenneth
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I've spent about three months in wrestling with these problems, after speaking to countless amounts of people and reading up - I've made the following conclusions:

 

- Whether you use ATI or Nvidia will give you a few options as to how to TWEAK the performance (agpgart can be a problem if you use nvidia, obviously ATI would not be the same).

 

- Neverwinter Nights is a VERY demanding game - speak to some Windows users and you will hear similar stories. You need a very good graphics adaptor with plenty of memory (128MB seems to be the comfort zone).

 

- The differences between graphics cards are astonishing - Nvidia MX series (depending on the manufacturer) will NOT give you very good performance. There are other problem chipsets - checkout the Bioware website forums.

 

- Linux propriety drivers being what they are - the bugs really show themselves with a game as demanding as NWN.

 

I have found some ways of getting better performance out of my MX440 - but not much. The bottom line is, drop your settings all the way down or upgrade your card if you want to see major change.

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- Neverwinter Nights is a VERY demanding game - speak to some Windows users and you will hear similar stories. You need a very good graphics adaptor with plenty of memory (128MB seems to be the comfort zone).

 

- The differences between graphics cards are astonishing - Nvidia MX series (depending on the manufacturer) will NOT give you very good performance. There are other problem chipsets - checkout the Bioware website forums.

Actually, in my experience, 128 MB of video ram is not important. The chipset matter more than video ram. I only have a 64 MB GeForce4Ti 4200 and NWN plain flies. My previous vidcard (GF2MX400) still can do NWN, only at much slower rate and I have to disable a lot of the "fun stuff" like reflective water, grass, etc.

 

Remember that NWN is an OpenGL game, so cards that flies in OpenGL will flies in NWN. The beta version of the linux client just plain didn't work with ATI cards (due to non-standard way ATI driver was calling OpenGL functions) until someone make a hack to enable them.

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- Neverwinter Nights is a VERY demanding game - speak to some Windows users and you will hear similar stories. You need a very good graphics adaptor with plenty of memory (128MB seems to be the comfort zone).

 

- The differences between graphics cards are astonishing - Nvidia MX series (depending on the manufacturer) will NOT give you very good performance. There are other problem chipsets - checkout the Bioware website forums.

Actually, in my experience, 128 MB of video ram is not important. The chipset matter more than video ram. I only have a 64 MB GeForce4Ti 4200 and NWN plain flies. My previous vidcard (GF2MX400) still can do NWN, only at much slower rate and I have to disable a lot of the "fun stuff" like reflective water, grass, etc.

 

Remember that NWN is an OpenGL game, so cards that flies in OpenGL will flies in NWN. The beta version of the linux client just plain didn't work with ATI cards (due to non-standard way ATI driver was calling OpenGL functions) until someone make a hack to enable them.

You're basically reiterating what I was trying to convey: that you need a good graphics card or lots of memory on a crappier card - BUT obviously the chipset determines the use of Dynamic Lights, Shadows, etc.

 

You need a monster for this game, I want to upgrade soon :deal: :cheesy::thumbs:

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Well - I learned a lot last night about what this game really needs. I'm going away on business next week so I installed it on my laptop - while booted to windows as I've already discovered that it simply won't run in linux on the laptop.

 

My specs:

 

Desktop: ATI Radeon 9800 pro - 128MB Ram, 2.4 Ghz processor and 1024 MB RAM

Laptop: ATI Mobility - 64MB RAM, 2.8 Ghz processor and 1024MB RAM

 

In Linux, NWN will not run on the laptop. In windows it will run - it is a little slower than under linux on the desktop, but infinately more stable! It does not judder or crash.

 

The card in my laptop is nothing compared to the card in my desktop.

 

This leads me to conclude that it's not si much the hardwar at issue - but a badly written client.

 

However, I did look again at DOlsen's FAQ and noticed that someone has written a patch for ATI cards in Linux.

 

I figured that maybe this will fix my stability issues under Linux and give me great performance on my desktop.

 

One of the steps is to use xdelta to patch nwmain. Bizarrely when I foolow the intructions in the readme, this produces and empty nwmain - and I cannot run the game! (it's ok, I had backed up the other one...)

 

Does anyone know anything about xdelta? The only output I get is:

$ xdelta patch -V nwmain-delta nwmain nwmain.new
xdelta: expected from file (nwmain) of length 8063413 bytes

 

I then get an empty file called nwmain.new - anyone any clues? This could change my nwnights experience if it works...

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I play it on my Laptop and it does pretty good. No lockups or jitters. Its a ATI Mobility M6(32mb) ram. Iget around 625 FPS in glxgears. Some stuf that made a difference.:

 

For me the biggest boost was my XF86Config settings:

 

Section "Screen"

Identifier "screen1"

Device "device1"

Monitor "monitor1"

DefaultColorDepth 24

 

Subsection "Display"

Depth 8

Modes "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

EndSubsection

 

Subsection "Display"

Depth 15

Modes "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

EndSubsection

 

Subsection "Display"

Depth 16

Modes "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

EndSubsection

 

Subsection "Display"

Depth 24

Modes "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

EndSubsection

EndSection

 

First it was setting it to 24 bit color. Then the big boost was changing the Modes to list all I wanted available. My desktop is 1280x124 but NWN runs at 800x600.

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Problem is - I average over 4000 FPS in glx gears and I still get bad performance; even with all the options set to minimum.

 

My card should be able to handle this game with ease - and yet it can't.

 

I suspect dodgy coding on the part of those porting the game... The card on my laptop plays the game fine under windows - but won't even try under linux....

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That's a shame - my card should be able to handle everything that NWN throws at it without any problems - but it can't quite. At least not without a few judders and the occasional crash...

 

There must be a way of getting the best performance out of this game...

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I'm sure my problems originate from my crappy AOpen Geforce 4 MX440 which religiously gives glxgears of 320 on every system I try it in.

You should get score better than 320 FPS with GeForce 4 MX.

However, it also depends on the resolution you are testing it with.

 

My GeForce 2 MX shows 900 FPS with glxgears.

 

Note: Some version of nVidia driver is buggier than others, this sucks. Make sure you test with glxgears when you upgrade to a new version. I remember using 1.0-4623 (beta), glxgears dropped to 500 FPS.....

 

Also, set your desktop / in-game screen color depth to 24bit. It will speed up things as well.

 

As for DRI s3tc patch, there is some progress in the making:

http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@list...t/msg14895.html

http://vayne.fdns.net/presario.html

Edited by zero0w
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Actually, it's a problem which is largely isolated to Fedora users AFAIK.

Then why did I have the same problem? I use Mandrake 10 CE.

um.. I was reffering to the opngl libs problem, which you solve by deleting a directory and reconfiguring.

 

You should get score better than 320 FPS with GeForce 4 MX.

However, it also depends on the resolution you are testing it with.

Which is why I said it was a piece of crap... because it is.

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