Stuttering/Jerky Camera

[Slybo]

Is anyone else getting this? The character all animate smoothly when running but the camera jerks really bad. I find it very off putting. I googled it and seen it mentioned in several places, they all dance around the issue with no solution as if to imply "sorry, that's just how it is".

[Frunklin]

What are you system specs?

[Slybo]

Doh! Sorry.

RAM: 6gigs
CPU: AMD Phenom QuadCore 2.5ghz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 / Driver 260.99
OS: Windows7 64bit

Mass Effect 2 and Assassins Creed 2 run silky smooth with max settings at 1920x1080

[SayaSe]

Turn off Render Far Shadows.

[Delicieuxz]

I get lurching, vibrating camera movement when I scroll the screen up/down/left/right. It's really annoying. I'll try turning off the far shadows thing.

Win7 Ult 64
e8400
4 bg ram
GTX 260 SLI

[Slybo]

Turn off Render Far Shadows.

Sorry but it was already off. I even turned all the settings to their lowest and cut the resolution in half. It stutters just the same.

[Bartje]

What is your Direct X? NWN2 needs DX 9.

[Slybo]

DX 11

[Freyar]

Been putzin' around with this myself. I did own a retail copy and I have played it on Win7 x64 before with the camera being relatively smooth in comparison.

Looking at this further, the camera is quite jerky when playing in "Character Mode", but if you switch to Strategic mode, the character movement is jerky. This tells me it's more a problem with the character's position being updated.

[Kogitsune]

I did some googling on this as well because it baffles me why my computer can't run this game at reasonable settings.

Could just be the problem with the mouse edge of screen scrolling bug. In your options of strategy mode turn off mouse scroll at edge of screen. It will still scroll at edge of screen but its just a bug and causes a lot of lag as well as choppiness.

I can't try this until I get home, but it might help your issue if it is the cause.

[cirons42]

I was actually having the exact same symptoms as Slybo. What ended up fixing it for me was a driver update along with a pc restart. There is another thread on this forum in this section where a guy asks and self answers with restarting his comp seemed to fix his problem, and that it was caused simply by 'long uptime' of his box.

[Slybo]

I was actually having the exact same symptoms as Slybo. What ended up fixing it for me was a driver update along with a pc restart. There is another thread on this forum in this section where a guy asks and self answers with restarting his comp seemed to fix his problem, and that it was caused simply by 'long uptime' of his box.

I played coop with a friend last night and noticed the camera was no longer stuttering. I thought it had something to do with playing online but I did in fact do a reboot just before playing!

[AudioCG]

Try setting the game to a single core affinity.

[Hi2u! Tw1TcH]

Try setting the game to a single core affinity.

Good idea here, NWN2 doesn't use multicore CPUs, its a single thread game.

Does sound odd though, maybe its just your mouse input, try and check a mouse smooth box to see if it makes a difference. (Or enable "Enhance Mouse Pointer Precision" in Windows mouse options).

Good luck.

[SayaSe]

Good idea here, NWN2 doesn't use multicore CPUs, its a single thread game.
You sure you aren't thinking of NWN1? Because CPU affinity was a known problem with that one.

[CrawlingChaos]

You sure you aren't thinking of NWN1? Because CPU affinity was a known problem with that one.

NwN2 defualts to core 0, and only uses that one core.. Setting it to a different core, i.e. core 1 ( on my C2Dou) makes a huge difference. As that core is not operating the O/S and background programs.

I'm on a 32 bit system, just FYI.

[Hi2u! Tw1TcH]

You sure you aren't thinking of NWN1? Because CPU affinity was a known problem with that one.

NWN1 came out before multicores were even considered normal.

NWN2 was on the cusp of when it was becoming normal, but it has no multicore support.

Excerpt from Tweakguides:

Neverwinter Nights 2's engine is not optimized ('multithreaded') for dual core CPUs. As such the game only uses the equivalent of one CPU at any time, and can't be forced to fully utilize both for better performance. Worse still, the developers have stated that the game may experience issues or reduced performance on dual core CPUs (See the game's Readme.rtf file).

[SayaSe]

I'm only asking because it works fine with my i5 (quad core) while NWN1 is a pain in the ♥♥♥ in more than one way.

[Freyar]

Well, after hanging around the NWN2's IRC for a bit, it's actually a timing issue with the engine and how long your machine's been up.

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=nwn2other.Detail&id=231

Solves a number of bugs and gets the timing back in line. You will have to use the manual method (IE: Applying the *.hdl) each time, but it solves a lot of problems and is well worth it. The guy that developed it has been working a new version to support the Steam release.

[airblad3]

Turn off Render Far Shadows.

This fixed the problem for me.

[Slybo]

Try setting the game to a single core affinity.

This worked! Now to deal with the horribly confusing and cumbersome UI and not to mention the r3t4rd3dly complex camera controls. (do we really need 3 independent schemes for this?)

Shame on you BioWare.



Shame



On




YOU.

[Skinker]

Bioware didn't develop NWN2, but yeah the camera sucks in this game.

[Slybo]

Try setting the game to a single core affinity.

This worked! Now to deal with the horribly confusing and cumbersome UI and not to mention the r3t4rd3dly complex camera controls. (do we really need 3 independent schemes for this?)

Shame on you Developer: Obsidian Entertainment™ & Publisher: Atari.



Shame



On




YOU.

[CrawlingChaos]

/facepalm ....

If you guys are having that hard a time with the camera controls.. take 5 minutes out of your day to configure them...

[Slybo]

/facepalm ....

If you guys are having that hard a time with the camera controls.. take 5 minutes out of your day to configure them...

After purchasing a new game and I start to hear things like "it gets good after 20 hours" and "it takes 5 minutes just to configure the 3 unnecessarily separate sets of horrible camera controls to make them more tolerable", it makes me think my $9.99 might have been wasted.

[AudioCG]

After purchasing a new game and I start to hear things like "it gets good after 20 hours" and "it takes 5 minutes just to configure the 3 unnecessarily separate sets of horrible camera controls to make them more tolerable", it makes me think my $9.99 might have been wasted.

Nah, the game is really fantastic, it does have some wonky controls/cameras at times, but I could point a finger at a whole host of GREAT games that have that EXACT same issue(s)....

At $9.99 you are certain to get far more game for your buck then you do most of the time now a days.:)

[NWN DM]

I'm guessing you've never configured your keys for a FPS or any other game then, ones you paid $50+ for then?

And the three camera modes are most certainly needed... depending on your surroundings they all have their situational uses.

[DarkSyd]

I know this is an old thread, but I fixed the jerky movement by moving the game from my hard drive (1TB 7200rpm) over to my SSD. Maybe the game constantly reads from the drive or something...whatever it is...smooth as silk from the SSD.

[4bs.zer0]

I had a stuttering camera problem while rotating (with mouse). Solved it by lowering the "Turn speed using mouse" slider.

My guess is that "gaming" mice tend to have high refresh rates and it ends up making NWN2 redraw the scene more often then NWN2 engine can handle.