Neverwinter Nights 2 hardware performance guide

Settings

Even if you have a powerful system, you might want to disable or lower quite a few settings in Neverwinter Nights 2 to improve performance because some effects just aren't worth the frame rate hit. The settings that deal with shadows in particular affect performance greatly. We managed to improve performance by almost 60 percent when we disabled point light shadows. You can do away with shadows altogether to double frame rates. If adjusting the lighting doesn't completely solve your performance woes, consider decreasing the texture sizes or lowering the resolution to squeeze out a few more frames.

Do not lower any of the texture-filtering settings (texture minification, magnification, and mipmap). Your performance will, in all likelihood, not increase by very much, and the game will get sinfully ugly. We have image comparisons of the texture filtering settings on the next page; however, still images fail to capture how horrible the game looks with reduced filtering.

Draw Distance Tests

(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Draw Distance 300

Draw Distance 150

Draw Distance 50

1600x1200, Medium Quality Settings

Draw Distance 300

40

Draw Distance 150

40

Draw Distance 50

49

System Setup: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Intel 975XBX2, 2GB Corsair XMS Memory (1GB x 2), 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2. Graphics Cards: GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB. Graphics Drivers: Nvidia Forceware 97.02.