Very slow game speed Options

[Shadan]

I am planning to play an another BG2 run while we are wating for v6 release, but I have one serious problem. In all of my BG2 games (was 3 of them with IA) I experienced a very slow game speed in certain situations.
1. When there were lot of enemies and/or corpses on the screen (like githayanki suprem leader fight).
2. When there were many spellanimation on the screen (like SI, Mirror Image, GoI, Spell Turning etc.).
3. When I fought against big monsters (like any dragon).

It was very frustrating sometimes. First I thought it is because I have some mods (like bottomless Bag of Holding), but later I had only IA and The Four installed after ToB patch, Baldurash and EoU, and I dind't have bottomless Bag of Holding at this time. Despite this clean and modfree IA install, I had very slow battles still. My computer is not the newest, but I have 2 giga memory and I can play all games, even WoW without any difficulty. Can anyone give some advices how can I avoid this slow speed in BG2?
Ah, I played in 1024*768 resolution, but I tried in 800*600 also to check if this could be a problem.

[Sikret]

If I remember correctly, you have played IA several times in the past without such a problem; so, you may just need to detect what has changed on your computer or in your game's configurations since those smooth run-throughs.

[critto]

Well, speaking from experience, Infinity games performance sometimes poses a certain problem on the modern hardware.
For example, on my main PC (p4-1.7 GHz, 1.5GB Ram, GeForce 6600 GT 128 Mb) with every last one of the Infinity games I always experience some kind of performance problems, Usually in situations similar to those you have described: large critters (like dragons), lots of spell animations and such.
So the solution here is to play with video settings of the game itself, try to search for the older video drivers (what's your video card, by the way?), disable Direct3D and DirectDraw acceleration (allowing the game itself to manage these things). Personally, I would recommend to go for the older drivers. I have managed to find them myself some time ago, but when I tried to do that again lately, I have met no luck.
So that is why I always play BG2 and other Infinity games on my laptop. It has quite enough resources in terms of memory and processor speed, but low-end radeon videocard, so BG2 runs very smoothly on it.

[Raven]

Hmm I have played IA for a long time on a far worse computer performance-wise and I haven't noticed any bad slow down. Have you tried the steps mentioned in the FAQ page:

1- Make sure that you have followed the mod's installation instructions accurately. In particular, make sure that you have NOT installed BG2 TweakPack.

2- Make sure that you don't have a bottomless bag of holding. (Also, make sure that you have not installed any other mod which adds new containers (bags, etc) to the game.)

3- Make sure that the 3d acceleration option is not turned on in your game's configuration.

4- Make sure that you have made a clean installation of the game before installing your current mods. Leftovers of old mods (even after uninstalling them) may cause such problems.

5- Make sure that a "Real Time Virus Protection" is not running in the background on your machine.

6- Make sure that your machine (if an old one) is not continuously running for more than 12 hours without a restart. A restart will help the machine to refresh its resources.

7- Make sure that the hard disk has at least 15% free space (both the directory in which windows is installed and the directory in which BG2 is installed).

8- Defragment your computer.

[matti]

It seems to me that your graphic card is the problem here; or cpu but I suspected graphic card. BG 2 runs flawlessly on my machine with graphic acceleration ON, only vertex pading is disabled, eventually check if vertex pading is disabled in your BG2 configuration menu and disable it. Try to disable all graphical options like static animations, spell effects, VEF Vid cells, disable animations during fights, etc. Lower your resolution also to 800x600.

Another possibilities:
- if you have soundblaster audio card try updating drivers, there was issues when soundblaster causes serious slowdowns in the game
- if your cpu is dual core set the game to use both cores

[Shadan]

Thanks for answers. Sikret, I always had this problem in all of my games. I thought this is cause of bottomless bag of holding in my 1st game, later I didn't installed this component.

Raven, of course I am speaking about fresh install without any other addon than IA and The Four. (No bottomless bag of holding.)

I will check my freespace on disks, and I will do defragmentation only, but I hope anwser is in BG2 graphic options, since I don't know which should be turned on or off.
I will try disable Direct3D and DirectDraw acceleration , vertex padding as some of you recommended. I will rry to disable all graphical options like static animations, spell effects, VEF Vid cells, disable animations during fights, etc.
I would thank if any expert could give me an exact advice which graphic options should be turned on or off.

I am planning an IA free game now, since I have never played whole Ascension, Tactics, Tortured Souls so instead of tactical game, now I am planning a heavy role playing game. This slowing speed is not important in this game (even SI animation is turned off by mod in my currently started game since it is not so crucial if I am not playing IA). My primal goal to make sure I can play flawlessly without any slow speed in IAv6, what I am waiting eagerly. I hope its release date is not delayed too much.

This post has been edited by shadan: Jan 20 2009, 10:37 AM

[Shadan]

I am at home now, I have NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT video card.

[The Bigg]

this might help.

[Shadan]

Thanks, I will check it.