Stuttering performance

ninjaliciousss

Hi, I've been experiencing pretty bad frame-skipping / stuttering in NWN:EE, which makes the game difficult to play. It generally seems to occur when new assets (generally npcs or pcs) come onto screen as I move through an area.

Here's some video of the problem. It may be difficult to see without full-screening, and is at its worst towards the end:
https://streamable.com/vbwxc

The hitches seem to correlate exactly with how many times a new pc/npc comes into view. Here's some frametime graphs too:

Running around in a huge but empty area (massive spikes are me tabbing in and out of the game):


Running around in multiplayer instance featured in the video above:


Running around in a populated area in the ShadowGuard module in single player:




Some fixes I've tried (to no avail):

- Uninstalling all custom content / reinstalling the game
- Lowering all settings to minimum (turning off skyboxes / anti-aliasing)
- changing max texture memory in the .ini file
- trying windowed mode and various combinations of resolutions / refresh rates / v-sync
- installing new gpu drivers
- Running the game in compatibility mode + as administrator
- Disabling steam overlay / launching nwnmain directly

Haven't been able to try fiddling with sound settings (a notorious cause of nwn stutters), as with recent updates the GUI for them is no longer functional.

Specs:
i7 7700k
gtx 970
16gb RAM

Any help / advice is appreciated!

Sylvus_Moonbow

Yes this is still an issue and even worse in the old 1.69 engine just not as bad of a load lag in EE I find but it is still a thing. Do not understand if it is a texture thing being loaded or a distance spawn that is there but not visually loaded until it reaches the range of the player which causes everything to load at once and makes load lag but it should have been fixed without a trello because of how obvious it is during gaming.

An earlier post made by another member.

ninjaliciousss

Sylvus_Moonbow said:

Yes this is still an issue and even worse in the old 1.69 engine just not as bad of a load lag in EE I find but it is still a thing. Do not understand if it is a texture thing being loaded or a distance spawn that is there but not visually loaded until it reaches the range of the player which causes everything to load at once and makes load lag but it should have been fixed without a trello because of how obvious it is during gaming.

An earlier post made by another member.

Yeah, definitely seems like something they'd want to fix before rolling this game out to a modern audience..

Oddly enough, it's much less noticeable on the old client for me (but still present). I'm guessing some of the modifications to the graphical system have kinda aggravated the problem on some setups, and it probably doesn't help that the GTX970 is known for its VRAM problems.

If any of the devs peek at this thread; I've found that the "Enviornment mapping on creatures" setting seems to affect the severity of the stutter, with the stuttering being much worse with it disabled.

Ninevene

I am experiencing this too. It is so bad, I can't play like this.

manotroll

how can a game of that turn between 26 ~ 33 fps in a ryzenr 7 1800x 32gb ram 390x
as I improve this the gold edition wheel edition at a much higher speed