NWN on dual-core systems
I loaded Neverwinter Nights on my new desktop tonight and noticed that it wasn’t running quite right. Rather the walking from place to place, the characters seemed to immediately “jump” there, and the video was all jittery. Fortunately Google was able to help me find a solution on the forums. Here’s a summary:
Problem: On systems with dual-core CPUs, characters seem to “teleport” and/or move too fast. Video is jittery and/or stutters.
Solution: Exit NWN. Edit nwnplayer.ini and change the value of Client CPU Affinity from -1 to 0. Save file, and restart NWN.
Fixed!
Update: Here’s the info on NWN’s CPU Affinity setting from the 1.67 Patch Details:
Added a new option to the nwnplayer.ini file under [Game Options] “Client CPU Affinity” (for Windows only). If you have more than one CPU on your PC, then you can use this setting to make the game run on only one of the CPUs by specifying the number of the CPU (0-31). Setting “Client CPU Affinity=-1″ will turn off CPU affinity.
More at Wikipedia under Processor Affinity.
Or broken. ;] NwN isn’t using the second core to run smoother now.
Yeah, based on the patch notes (see update) it looks like that setting will force the game to run on Core 0 only. That’s OK. It runs fine on one core, even with all the settings maxed out.
I didn’t really expect older games to take full advantage of the dual-core X2 when I upgraded.
Thanks for pointing that out though. I hadn’t really ever looked into “processor affinity” before, as I’m relatively new to whole dual-core world.
I wonder if this is an issue in Linux. I haven’t tried NWN since I got my dual-core beast last year. I’ll have to give that a shot and see what happens.
Hey B-rad:
I would assume the problem would show up in Linux too. The good thing is that as long as you are running a version that includes the 1.67 patch, the “fix” will be the same.