After running into some issues running The Witcher 3, I've gotten into the habit of running SpeedFan when I start up new games on my PC. I've actually been skipping this for older games, as I've rarely found problems, but I remembered NWN2 had some optimization issues and decided to see what would come up.

NWN2 currently runs my CPUs hotter than The Witcher 3 did at max settings.

Before I cleaned my PC, I had my 4 CPU cores jump up between 90 and 100 C while playing The Witcher 3. This led to me discovering that I had been neglecting to clean out the inside of the fan casing instead of just the outside, and after the temps ran between the 80 and 90 C range. Not great, but better. Especially since I was playing at max settings.

(GPU never got above 60, and neither does it for NWN2 for the record.)

So I've been keeping my fans clean, running SpeedFan more often, and The Witcher 3 has been by far and away the most intensive game to use my CPU. That is, until I ran the latest NWN2 - version 2.2.0.10.

My 4 CPU cores are quickly hitting 90 C as soon as I start up NWN2, and then they rocket up to 100 C when I get into actually playing the game. That's insane - particularly for a game that came out ~10 years ago. I've tried lowering the graphics (why not?) and at 1280 x 720 the CPUs are shooting up to 85 - 90 C.

Am I missing something? I did mess with the graphics before playing the game, as there is little my PC can't handle, but maybe I checked a box that secretly eats up a ton of CPU resources? Any ideas would be appreciated.

NWN2 is a system hog. I'm sure others can give you more details, but the game is simply not very well built under the hood and is a lot harder on your system than it should be. Being 10 years old is a bit deceptive, since it came out towards the end of the single-core era. It's basically taxing one of your CPU's at full throttle and leaving the others idle, which actually causes a lot more heat than distributing the work across four CPU's would.

I did some exploring, and I found some info on the RPGCodex. Yep, that RPGCodex. They have their moments.

Anyway, it seems that shaders and water reflections were implemented CPU side for some reason. Having a fairly high end PC, I had all shadows at max settings, along with all the optional shadow toggles. I didn't bother with water reflections. I turned them all off, and I managed to get the CPU down to a decent 70 C. It's still pretty high for my machine, but it's tolerable.

The weird part is that I don't remember my PC running quit this hot back in 2007 when I first purchased this game, but whatever. Like Darvin said, it could be that going from a single core to a quad core has its own issues.

*EDIT* - Further testing has shown that setting the affinity to Core 3 (apparently I have 8) dropped the overall CPU temp another 10 C down to 60 C. Quite an improvement. Too bad I have to do that each time. Still, I'm leaving this here for anyone that might run into this problem in the future.

You can make a batch file to launch the game & set the affinity to Core 3.

EDIT: Sorry totally messed up the reply formatting... I'll try again

Sorry to butt in here but how does one go about making a batch file to do this? Thanks.

That is the issue actually.
NWN2 was made in age where Multi-threading was not understanding correctly or well done. The reason you got the high temperature is because only one of the cores is used at 100% instead of distributing the work (reducing the power consumption with under-clocking a processor and giving it multiples cores was the reason why we passed from single core to multi-core, wit the side-effect that less power consumption is equal to less heat) .

Basically, any game prior 2000's will use only one core, any game between 2000-2006 will be using strange ways to multi-core or not at all.

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C START "nwn2.exe" /affinity 2 "G:\Games\NWN2 Complete\nwn2.exe"

Cut and paste this into the target of your shortcut. See Pic

You will have to change the G:\Games\ part to where ever you have installed the game.

Thank you :) +1

EDIT: I've been thinking about this - does the "affinity 2" setting mean that it is spreading the load over 2 cores? As I have a quad core should I set it to affinity 4 instead?

No. The /affinity setting is a hex mask for which cores the process is allowed to use. 2 sets it to only run on core 2. NWN runs better when only allowed to use a single core. Or is that NWN 1?

For above, to set it to use core 3 you need to give it /affinity 4:

If you want the affinity on all four cores, set it to 0xF (that's 15 decimal or 1111 binary).

Setting affinity to 2, just makes it use core 2 instead of core 1
Setting affinity to 3, will tell it use two cores, but it will use 1 1/2
You can tell it to use four cores, but it won't. The most you'll get is one and a half.

Edit: Actually setting it to 6 is your best bet. It will use 3/4s of cores 2 & 3 and leave core 1 free for Windows and single threaded background tasks which use core 1 by default.

See Pic

Thank you Gydion, Hickory and olnorton for your help, it now all makes sense to me. +1 to all.

I would grant you inspiration for all your DnD games in your future if i could <3 thank you so mutch, I thougt I was going crazy even after upgrading to a 240 AiO and still getting jet engine noice from my tower

thank you again from 13 years in the future