is it just me, or is NWN2 absurdly taxing?

It's either absurdly taxing, or absurdly poorly optimized... Hell, maybe both.

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

Has anyone tried NWN 2 on Core 2 Duo E6750/Q6600 or similar CPU and Geforce 8800 card? I wonder if a machine like that can run the most demanding maps at highest graphical settings smoothly.

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

There you go. The game is better designed for Nvidia architecture if you read about it in the various X-bit lab gfx card benchmarking using NWN2. Also, the game itself only uses 1 core while the toolset uses multiple cores!

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.

even so, you'd think that by now..... (i mean, i cant even remember when it came out... you'd think today's gfx cards should handle it...)

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 The graphics are outdated, and were so even at the time of release.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.

Best example was Star Wars Battlefront, around 50,000 copies shipped with an installer bug that prevented it from even installing. Just started MOTB and it's a little slow on my 1950 at high at 1280.

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.

Ive got an E6750, 2gig DDR2 800 and an 8800GT. The game came with the GT, and i seem to be able to run it fine on max settings. The only problems ive noticed is if u change the anti aliasing, its a bit jumpy but as soon as you restart the game its fine, nothing unexpected. Runs very smoth as far as im concerned.

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!

Runs great on my system, 16x12, 4xAA, 16XAF, all max settings.

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

yes, i do remember that quite well, and actually had to hit it up again... i have a geforce 4? ti4200 with 128 megs mem. runs it pretty smooth at highest settings, all maxed out except AA. that's turned off.

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

I got E6750 @ stock with HD3870 crossfired and runs at 1680 x 1050 with high setting , the game stutter a lot, however when i set the game to use 1 cpu only it turns out very smooth.

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?

Well, I was pretty heavily involved in the beta testing for the game way back when. The NWN1 PW builders were invited to test the software quite extensively, including both the client and toolset for building.

There were quite a few issues reported which were not addressed (and still are not addressed today), which is part of the reason why I've moved on to different games.

About 90% of the major issues with the game were caused by using a dated graphics engine, and then the subsequent "modifications" to said engine which were not, in any way, optimized.

Not being a graphical engine coder, I cannot begin to describe what might have gone wrong, but I can say that most of the hooks built into the game for modificaiton did not work properly at release. How the propretary stuff worked then brings the question, "how did they get it to work".

I believe there were a lot of "workarounds" with the base release which still exist to this day, but again, I can't see the source code.