Arcane Tower portal area is laggy like hell

[Tarkus the dog]

So I was wondering if something could be done about that.

[Dr_Hazard89]

Yep, often my FPS will drop down to about clay-mation levels in that place. Makes me avoid the tower, hard.

[Vrass]

Odd runs fine for me... weird.

[Gable Morninglord]

+1

This place sucks, and I avoid it like the plague.

There is WAY too much stuff going on at the Arcane Tower.

[strong yeet]

One of the many ENHANCEMENTS courtesy of our friends at Beamdog is that many visual spell effects lag the game very very badly, especially on lower end machines. So places like the Tower, or the first area of Avernus with all the tentacles, or the beginning part of the Mind's Eye that have lots of sparkles and placed down spells tend to slow down the game to a sputtering chug.

[Dr_Hazard89]

16g ram
1080gtx
i7
blahblah

Wouldn't really call it low-end but could use some upgrades, but as far as NWN is considered I'm playing this on a supercomputer from the future. Yet I still get massive FPS drops in areas like the shadow-plane (lots of fog fixtures) and the arcane tower. On some days the arcane tower is strobe-light levels of FPS-murder, while usually it just drops to around 10. Yuck.

Star Citizen gives me better FPS, for comparison. Pew pew.

Maybe until they enhance enhanced edition we could cut back on some of these decorations in popular areas, like the tower. It's painful to even sit still there, and with how often people like to attack it these days, it's not a fun feeling knowing you have to PvP while dropping frames like Spears drops babies.

[TimeAdept]

One of the many ENHANCEMENTS courtesy of our friends at Beamdog is that many visual spell effects lag the game very very badly, especially on lower end machines. So places like the Tower, or the first area of Avernus with all the tentacles, or the beginning part of the Mind's Eye that have lots of sparkles and placed down spells tend to slow down the game to a sputtering chug.

Yep. It has to do with how the engine handles transparent VFX and vertex shading (?) and other new engine calls for visual effects that weren't present in vanilla NWN but now are.

Thanks Beamdog.

[strong yeet]

No no, I said "especially" lower end. I have a computer I put together in late April and the game still lags up in the Tower or other similar places. It's a problem that does affect most users in varying degrees

[Tarkus the dog]

Yeah if something goes down at the Tower don't count my character to join in

Very often I need to restart the game just to fix my FPS, it lags like mad when I want to look around. But miraculously just literally turning the game on and off fixes that issue.

What have you been doing with the game, Beamdog? What do the members of the merchant's guild don't want us to know?

[Xarge VI]

The tower indeed lags a little bit for me as well. But far less than Skaljard village. Whenever I go to that area the lag is so crippling I can't even see where I'm going.

[Azaria]

the biggest lag i get from those gory bloody fountain portals like at talassians or fomorians

[In A Motionless Scene]

In my eyes, Bendir + Greyhammer are the worst.

Also in terms of FPS drops.

[Twily]

I also suffer from these FPS drops, but I notice it's not every single time.

If I restart my game entirely(full restart, not just reconnect) and log back in already inside the tower, I don't have lag.
If people who have the lag issue could attempt this, I'd appreciate it.

I plan to file a report to Beamdog about it, but I need to find some specifics on when the lag is and isn't present so that they have something to go off of.

[-XXX-]

It's the same for me, whenever the FPS gets "enhanced", I can restart the game to fix it entirely. That'd probably hint at this not being a computer performance related issue.

[Nitro]

Tower+Bendir are the laggiest for me, probably because they've so much stuff crammed into one area.

[Dalek Caan]

Not a true specialist here, but I tend to think the Aurora Engine wasn't made for all the fancy shenanigans that were introduced. I have a fairly beastly system and still go down to 10fps in the worst cases.

Not 100% sure if this is accurate, but in the standard NWN days, only a limited number of lights was rendered. Now, that restriction was removed, meaning lots and lots of performance loss. Pair that with an old and outdated engine and even really good machines are in trouble.

Maybe a clean-up and optimization of some areas would do wonders. Sounds like a serious load of work though.

If Beamdog could, at some point, optimize the engine (I don't even know if that's possible!)... it would be just awesome. Models with more polies at equal fps? Yes please!

[CragOrion]

I also have a decent machine and still get bad framerate drop entering the tower. Has anyone reported it to beamdog?

[sad_zav]

I went there earlier (and the shadow plane, too) and fps was surprisingly good.

Went there again just now and it tanked. Only difference was that there were two other people there too

[Tarkus the dog]

I also get insane lag when I'm turning my camera around once I have been online for some time. I need to restart my game in order to fix this. Inside areas like the Arcane Tower foyer this gets even worse, and a restart also fixes it a tad, for time being.

[Coul]

Just to add I notice huge FPS gains(almost double) from removing my UI in EE while playing the game just press h and watch your FPS double

[Maladus]

They are planning a huge rendering rewrite, hopefully that improves things for everyone.

[Tarkus the dog]

All twenty five hamsters of mine and myself are crossing our fingers.