Increasing the framerate

[Guest Icarian]

I just reinstalled the Baldur's Gate series, and this mod immediately caught my attention. I have a Lenovo L220X 22" full HD widescreen, and I was very thrilled about the prospect of playing BG2 in its native resolution (1920x1200).

 

The mod works like a charm, but it substantially reduces my framerate. The game becomes visibly choppy, on a PC that handles max settings in newly released games without breaking a sweat.

 

Any idea how to fix this? If not, I'll have to go back to 800x600. (I'm using Vista, if that makes a difference.)

 

Thanks in advance.

[agris]

Just going to say the obvious first: do you have 3D acceleration enabled?

Also, depending on what your video driver choice is, some don't recognize the launching of bgmain.exe as a 3D program and ramp the clock speed / voltage / timings of the videocard up to regular game mode, and leave them in low-power desktop mode. If you are using something like ati tray tools, this is especially easy to let happen. Even if your not using ati tray tools, it might be a good idea to log your GPU speed before and after launching the game, and make sure it is ramping up the GPU as intended.

 

Lastly, this is an old game with a lot of processing that isn't accelerated by 3D cards or multicore. If you're in a coastal (or equally watery) area, try turning ambient sounds off. For whatever reason, a lot of ambient sound threads will reduce the game to a stuttering mess. Perhaps lowering the DX sound acceleration is an alternative to this, but I've never heard of it (not)working.

[Guest Icarian]

Now that I'm back to BG2 (after a thorough playthrough of EasyTutu), I'm noticing poor performance even without the widescreen mod installed. Oddly enough, this wasn't the case with EasyTutu, even though it uses the same engine.

 

3D acceleration is enabled, but it doesn't seem to be working properly. Even with ambiental sounds off, the game is still a "stuttering mess," as you so aptly put it... and I just don't get why. Even if it uses only a small portion of my processor and memory, it should still be more than enough to run smoothly.

 

The game was created with 400 MHz / 64 MB RAM configurations in mind (and that's the recommended one at that)! ...My cache size is currently set to 2048 MB. Should I increase that value?

 

I do have a red ATI icon in my system tray, so I suppose that could be it. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to either log my GPU speeds or make it recognize the game as a 3D program.

[Jarno Mikkola]

...

Have you done all these:

1. Always patch the game(s) with the latest patch, start a new game and exit after the game has auto-saves itself(so you have to make a char or choose a pre-made one), before you do any moding, and you might as well make a safe backup from the important files: data and override folders, baldur.exe, BGMain.exe, dialog.tlk and CHITIN.key .

2. Put the ambient sounds off from the BGConfic.exe, as some of the areas might have no ambient sounds and so the game tries to start them many time continuously, and so looses processing power.

3. Don't mess with the game configurations so the speed adjustment percentages stay on "normal" ratings even if you have very high end machine, as the game has own it's internal fps counter, it sometimes tries to correct the fps on it's own by lowering graphs etc. Also the games frame rate should be set to about 30, as that's the default.

4. I wouldn't recommend to install any of the speaking item mods, as they run their scripts and fire their comments everywhere, and that's bad for the fps(frames/second count).

5. Inventory management(no stacks that have more than about 200 items, in a bag, arrows etc.), -might also help. And do not carry too many bags of holding and the like storage items.

6. Trying to avoid too many effects on a character(about 20 is fine, 200 is too many, and 20 000 is way way too many...)

7. De-fragmenting your hard drive might also help... as you don't have to go find the data in the pieces. (hmm, there is a joke in there, hih)

8. Before installing the mods, plan the exact order, so they are in correct order, and make sure if you uninstalled the game that you deleted the old mod files, the data and override folders(don't go and overwrite them) so you can start from a clean install, so there is no leftovers from old mods.

9. Helpful links for Tutu and BGT(the .pdf files) -based Megamods.

10. Take note that you should do all the points 1-9 before you install any mods!

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11. And when you have installed all the mods you are going to, it might be a good idea to biff your override folder, but do that knowing that you generally can't change the game much after. The easiest way to do this is to use the End_biff from here.

12. Repeat the step 7 again, if you think it might help.

13. When you quit the game, delete the old files from the Cache folder, if the game puts any files there.

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14. Complete all the quests you are given, as in a long game, the scripts that are looking IF you have this-or-that quest active, they will be screaming and causing lags, if their checks are in global category and used all the time...