is it just me, or is NWN2 absurdly taxing?

it seems to cause my computer (x2 4200 2 gigs ram and 2900 pro) substantially more trouble than COD4 manages!

I dont think any graphics card makes a very good go of nw2. Just a bit shoddy in that department i guess.

even my system stuttered with max settings on. for me at least the problem turned out to be shadows. if i toned down environment shadows i was then able to run all other max settings just fine. having just finished mask of the betrayer, i can say the problem persists there as well. it still looks good without shadows, however, and you can keep the character shadows on if u want

I managed 8 hours prime 95 with my E4300s 3.2GHz OC.

NWN2 caused BSOD in 5 minutes, and was only stable when I dropped the OC to 3.0GHz.

The game is just poorly optimized and is very buggy.
It's not that today's hardware is incapable of handling it due to its graphical splendor. The graphics are outdated, and were so even at the time of release.
You can have the fastest graphics card in existence (times four even), but if a game is designed poorly, you'll be getting poor performance. That's how it is with NWN2.
That game, IMO, should never have been released. Even now, after God knows how many patches, the game still performs poorly even on the best systems.
My opinion is this: Games like this should be avoided at all costs, and not purchased whatsoever. That should be enough to send the developers and publishers a message that we will not pay full price with our hard earned money for a half-a$$ed game, so that next time they'll do a better job before charging us $50 for a piece of crap.

Sorry about the rant, but it's just that seeing games like this just reminds me of the money I've wasted on similar ones.

I remember at the time NWN 1 was released the most powerful graphics card was Radeon 8500. That card couldn't run the game smoothly with very high or even high visual settings. When I got Radeon 9700 I could use maximum visuals with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. A few years later some PW developers created such maps for NWN 1 that even Radeon 9700 couldn't handle the graphics smoothly.

NWN 2 should probably run well enough on the next generation high-end graphics cards, though even those won't probably run smoothly the most complicated maps that people will design.

It seems ok on nVidia cards.

My laptop (Core 2 Duo T7700 2.4GHz, 8700M GT SLi 256MB per card, 4GB Ram) can run close to max settings at 1920x1200.

My desktop (Core 2 Extreme QX6800@3.73GHz, 8800GTX SLI) can max it out at 2560x1600.

I'll test it with SLI disabled on the desktop later, but don't forget that SLI performance at 2560x1600 is usually about the same as single card @1920x1200, as 2560x1600 is a hell of alot of pixels!

that's how they make games now.. when it releases, it's too hard on current hardware to run well...that's why you buy games that are older than your computer! :-p

I got Q6600 OC to 3.0 Ghz with 8800GT + 4gb 800mhz ram and it runs lame as. What a disappointment

I got NWN2 free with my 8800GT. I also have a Q6600 and 4gb of Black Dragon ram. For most of the time I get around 50FPS but it will randomly drop to 16FPS!

It's just a sign of very very poor optimisation. It's a bit like the Ice parts in Crysis, at what point did they think that was optimised?