Tech Questions

NWN is quite an old game now, theres been a bit of a thread on the DM forums about runnig NWN on newer multi core PCs and fancyschmancy graphics cards, with different people having different problems with NWN.

Ive had a few people ask me, who have thought about reinstallin NWN and giving Aeon a try, one has been successful but still suffers from periodic crashes, another has follwed some advice from the tinterweb but is still struggling.

Not sure of their system specs but I believe they are running 64 bit Vista.

Anyhoo thought Id start a thread with these things in mind. Maybe we can Sticky? Or move to a more prominent place?

I reinstalled 64bit XP for a few days but had immediate problems reinstalling old games. I jumped online and saw that everyone was, mostly trying to replace necessary software drivers. Seemed too much trouble just to take advantage of my extra half gig of memory, so I reverted to XP pro.... and well, met with more problems, particularly with NWN.

The solution to conflicts with multicore processors is to turn off all but one processor... which certainly struck me as defeating the purpose of having multiple processors. Still, I stuck with this because I knew of all the problems people were having with Vista. Nothing like backwards compatibility. Microsoft becoming the top software company is as bewildering to me as McDonalds becoming to top fast food restaurant, or George W becoming president. There seems to be an extraordinary devotion in the community to products that suck that that I can only conclude is the endearing support for the kid coming last.

Muliti processors confuse NWN as they weren't really around to be taken advantage of back in the day. The main advantage is for builders for can have the toolset running on one and the client running on the other when testing.

I'm using Vista 32-bit on a dual core machine and don't have a lot of issues apart from the graphics drivers sometimes stopping (reverts back to Vista basic colour scheme when I start it up).

Heres a question for the techheads.

Im looking at possibly getting one of these new netbooks, with the intel atom processor, most of them are integrated graphics, but some come with 1 gb ram and decent sized harddrives. Ive seen a mention of people playing starcraft on them and other older games.

So Im thinking ... What about Neverwinter Nights?

It would be great if I could get one of these to take to work and do some NWN work on the side when I have downtime, it has to be small and concealable lol. Thats why Im not bothering to look at bigger laptops.

Bit late, but worth saying that if don't have a damn good reason to be running 64 bit Vista (ie you absolutely have to run something that will only work under it), you should be running 32 bit Vista. 64 bit Vista seems to have a lot more driver issues. There's also no advantage to running games and the like, unless there is a special 64 bit distribution. 32 bit software will be running in a 32 bit box, even though it's a 64 bit OS.

Oh, and if you can afford it, get Ultimate. It's got enough problems without you having to argue with a version that's had bits hacked out of it.

With any 32 bit OS, put 4 x 1GB sticks of the faster RAM you can afford onto the mother board (assuming it'll support it). Although you can't use most of the last stick, 4x1GB normally runs faster than 2x2GB - and most MBs won't let you install 3x1GB (but if they did, it would also be slower). This is due to the way the MB organizes the memory in banks - it's designed to work best with 4 sticks. Even with a 64 bit OS, a 32 bit app (like NWN or the toolkit) won't be able to use any more then 3.2GB of RAM - 'cause it's a 32 bit app. TYpically, unless you've gone crazy with placables and effects, it doesn't need anywhere near that much.

With any Vista you need to turn superfetch and prefetch off.

With Vista or XP you need two physical hard drives, to turn automatic dumping off and the create a swap file on the hard drive that doesn't have your OS. The speed increase is quite noticable.

As you've found, with quad cores, you need to set the processor affinity - but remember to set a different number for the game and the toolkit, otherwise they'll end up fighting over the same one.

With things like the netbook, check the CPU speed. You're looking for something at least 2 GHz or higher - preferable up around 2.8 -> 3. If you can only get a 1.8, it's always going to be slow.

Hard drives these days should be SATA 2 (300MB/second) - anything else is to slow. Fast hard drives also speeds up the toolkit expanding areas to disk when it opens them.

Ive found with personal experiance, that turning superfetch off in vista, increases load times for everything, sure, it uses a bit more memory, but if your running 3 - 4 gigs, its not going to worry you, and cacheing all the things you do alot of often, certanly helps when you keep accessing it over and over, and ive also found that games load a good 30% faster with it on, rather than having it off, though, this is just when running a single standard speed hard drive, if your running a raptor 10,000 rpm drive, or a raid of some description, superfetch may or may not have the opposite effect.

And 32bit vs 64 bit, compatability used to be a problem in the age of xp 32bit vs 64 bit, 64 bit xp was a bitch and a dog and noone supported it, Vista now with people almost constantly going 4 gig and up with memory (the I7's most people will go 6 gig), 32bit just doesn't cut it to use all your memory, sure 32 big games wont use it, but the excess memory they don't use can still be used by windows and other background processes, while leaving the full 3.2 gig for the game. im running 64bit windows 7 currently at work, and have had 99% compatabilty with vista products and 32bit programs.