MaglorD

Heh, a friend of mine tried KotOR after having played Doom3 and found the graphics so horrible he stopped playing. I myself have moved on from KotOR 2 to Guild Wars and have to say, the graphics of Guild Wars are worlds apart compared with KotOR. I'm almost tempted to say that the KotOR engine was designed by a bunch of amateurs. Guild Wars' graphics are stunning and run at consistently high frame rates with everything maxed out on my system. I have not encountered any bugs at all, no Dantooine glitches, no black screens, no characters getting stuck on a spot etc. This is all due to superior development skills and excellent testing, including beta testing. It has literally tons of skills to play with. I wish all rpgs could have Guild Wars' graphics. They put companies like Bioware to shame for designing crappy bug-ridden engines. I do agree though, story is an important aspect of games, but so too is replayability, which most single player games lack. Morrowind was a notable exception since there was so much to do in that game. Kotor1/2 are rather superficial in comparison. Guild Wars was designed from the outset to be a multiplayer game but unlike other multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, there is no exhorbitant monthly fee.

It's not your graphics card. The Telos residential area suffers from some kind of memory leak and causes the symptoms you describe. Once you leave the area, the lag will disappear.

OK, after reading the other messages, looks like I got Longhorn mixed up with Windows 64-bit. The problems were on Windows 64-bit rather than Longhorn. Since Windows 64-bit is designed as a server OS, why anyone would want to use it for gaming is beyond me.

Somebody posted on an ATI forum claiming to be experiencing slideshow performance with Neverwinter Nights on Longhorn. Not sure if it's due to his system configuration or Longhorn.

Since the 6600 and 5900(XT) are about the same price, I would definitely not go for the inferior 5900(XT) regardless of bottlenecking or whatever else.

Why recommend Nvidia's crappy FX series? If I wanted to go for an FX 5900 or 5900 XT, might as well go for the 6600. They are about the same price.

I can run at maxed graphics options with no slowdowns even with lots of action on screen on my X800 XTPE on Dantooine as long as I have DVBO in my swkotor2.ini and your point was? The problem is not everyone knows about DVBO. Currently, an ATI user cannot simply install the game and expect it to work where Dantooine is concerned. They have to tweak their swkotor2.ini to include the option and that means having to search around for the solution, which may be daunting for some people.

I didn't have any slowdowns on Dantooine playing with the 6800GT on their 66.93 drivers and generally haven't seen many Nvidia people complaining about slowdowns on Dantooine, whereas all ATI users experience the Dantooine lag one way or another with the newer ATI drivers unless they use the workaround.

Shows that ignorance is still rampant... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I wonder what genius deleted the stickied huge thread about working ATI drivers. Good job, not. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It isn't deleted, just unstickied. I guess Obsidian didn't want people thinking there were obvious issues with ATI graphics cards. If I'm not wrong, they are under the mistaken impression 5.4 solves all the issues, even without having to fiddle around with swkotor2.ini. As long as the workaround(DVBO) has to be used, you will find people complaining about the lag continually. Same thing happens on the KotOR 1 forum, but at least over there they leave the thread stickied, yes there is an ATI thread there too.

Shows that ignorance is still rampant...

OK in that case, it's a game bug. I probably did not encounter it with the Nvidia because I failed to complete fixing the airspeeder...got invited by the Exchange too soon for that game. As for the saving bit, sorry but I don't notice any lag while doing that on both Nvidia and ATI. Could be a hard disk thingy as I'm running on SATA drives.

I actually thought the influence thing with Bao-Dur was a feature. Yeah, it was irritating getting light mastery with Bao-Dur and then losing it after a while for no apparent reason. The lag at the airspeeder only occurs after you destroy Goto's yacht. I'm not sure if you still remember but did you experience it with the ATI or Nvidia or both? I got the impression that it only happened with the ATI and with the Nvidia, there was no airspeeder at the docks after destroying Goto's yacht.

Maybe, but the Fuel Depot with the Force Fields and T3 does not have any smoke that I can remember but has slight frame rate issues with ATI. Dantooine doesn't have any smoke either and yet experiences extreme slowdowns with ATI unless you have Vertex Shader Objects disabled. The only place with smoke cited is the Mining Tunnels and I get the same slowdown on both Nvidia and ATI at the Reddish Orange area, so this one could be due to the CPU. Jekk Jekk Tarr and Malachor V(poison area) are full of smoke but I didn't get slowdowns with ATI(Vertex Shader Objects disabled) or Nvidia. You also mentioned that the Aurora/Odyssey could be built on the Quake 3 engine. Funny thing is when I played Jedi Academy(uses Quake 3 engine) on my ATI card, I had zero issues and the frame rate was 90 consistently(probably CPU limited) with all graphics options maxed and resolution of 1280x960 and far superior graphics. So yes, the Aurora/Odyssey is rather crappy in comparison to Quake 3 graphics-wise.

Those 3 areas you mentioned have no problems on Nvidia cards. The problem lies with the interaction between ATI cards and the Odyssey engine. When I played on the Nvidia, I did not notice any specific lag in those areas but it was impossible to miss on the ATI. If you enable the Vertex option in the ini file, Dantooine is perfectly smooth. However it doesn't fix the obvious but bearable problems at the Fuel Depot with T3. As for the mining tunnels. the only slowdown I encountered was in the area of superheated steam(reddish orange area). This was encountered on the Nvidia too but it's such a small area that it's minor to me. There are several other small areas where the ATI encounters slowdowns. There seems to be a memory leak at the Telos residential area that causes slowdowns for both Nvidia and ATI. It doesn't happen all the time though.

I haven't tested the original but from what I read in the Bioware KotOR forum, it isn't fixed either. http://swforums.bioware.com/