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/

Yes, the poor frame rate on Dantooine without enabling Disable Vertex Shader Objects seems to only have started from 4.12 onwards. So it should be within the ability of ATI to fix it but they somehow cannot or will not. I guess it's not really an issue as long as you know the workaround. Take note that several Catalysts before 4.11, which might include 4.7, suffer from crashes to desktop after repeated area transitions.

heh, lemme guess. ATI Radeon graphics card? Your best bet is to adjust the gamma from the ATI control panel since the ingame gamma control is glitchy for ATI cards. The patch does nothing for graphics related issues...

It doesn't on loading initally but it returns if you quicksave at certain parts of Dantooine. Good news is you can bypass the problem totally by enabling Disable Vertex Shader Objects.

The patch did nothing to optimise frame rate issues at all. I believe they were more interested in fixing gameplay bugs. All ATI users except the trolls in this forum know Dantooine is a problem with the newer Catalyst drivers, ie 4.12 onwards. ATI claimed to have fixed the problem with their latest drivers 5.4. While this may be largely true, the lag returns with a vengeance if you quicksave at certain framerate sensitive areas such as the first exit from Khoonda, just after crossing the bridge across the stream. At least that's where I noticed the lag returning. I couldn't be bothered to test elsewhere as I've already played the game several times, LS DS male and female. You can bypass these problems if you enable Disable Vertex Shader Objects(DVSO) in your swkotor2.ini. PS: Also if you choose not to enable DVSO, Malachor V(poison gas area) will have half its usual frame rate. Probably will affect other areas in the game too.

The OS is Windows XP Professional w/ SP2. As I said, the only editing I have done to my swkotor2.ini file is enable cheats. I haven't disable the vertex buffer, and I see no reason to do so. The game plays perfectly as it is. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I too have no lag problems as long as I don't quicksave(f4) on Dantooine using Cats 5.4. ATI admitted there *IS* a lag problem on Dantooine in the readme of their latest Catalyst driver. Of course, you could be lucky and not experience any problems at all. Or you could be lying as there's no way to verify what you're saying.

That statement makes no sense. Cheats are a seperate issue, and wouldn't very likely have any effect on whether or not one faces technical or graphical issues. If anything, cheating would make the game more unstable and more prone to problems. I've played through the game the first time without cheats. I then enabled them to experiment and have fun, in addition to gaining certain items I didn't collect before due to the random item generator. So having played the game with and without cheats, and with three different versions of ATI drivers, I have to say that on an ATI card, KoTOR 2 plays extremely well. It runs smoothly and looks great. Once again, I blame these supposed problems on the pc configuration and how clean the hard drive is, not the particular driver or card. If it were the latter, I wouldn't have been able to play like I did. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> And I blame the problems on ATI. Catalyst 4.11 did not have any lag problems on my system and everyone posting in this thread except you. The problem only started 4.12 onwards and the workaround was to use Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1. In the 5.4 readme, ATI themselves claimed to have solved the lag problems on Dantooine in their readme. Unfortunately, the moment one quicksaves(f4), the lag returns. So tell me, if indeed the problems are due to pc config or unclean hard drive, then how come ATI says they fixed the problem with their driver in their readme for Cats 5.4? Of course it wasn't really a fix since it breaks when one quicksaves.

Why don't you try playing the game without enabling cheats then maybe you will be able spot the problems?

It's the line that is working for you. Try removing it and doing a quicksave(F4) while at Dantooine. The lag starts right after that.

What operating system? Do you have Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1 in your swkotor2.ini? The other thing is to try disabling cheats.