Alright, this is truly frustrating but basically my NWN 1 game has an annoying stutter everytime my character moves and it looks like I have sand in my eyes. Upon checking my fps I noticed that with trace fps the game is going from 23 fps to 24 fps in a rapid manner, back and forth.

I have an I7 6700k 4.0 ghz CPU with two GTX 980 TI's and a 2560 x 1440 144hz monitor.


What is going on?

First of all, NWN uses non-standard OpenGL and new graphics drivers (especially ATI) don't conform to Bioware's hacky system and often choke when it's not their fault, so your first steps should be to reboot your computer (because it often cures many Windows ills), and next try to roll back to an older driver for your video card, if only to check if that's the problem. Next, try different sound options in-game, since sound can also be an issue here.

NWN1 also happens to be heavily single-core oriented, to the point that performance is frequently impacted on multicore systems using the default Windows core scheduling. (A number of games from this time period also suffer from this issue, IIRC; it's not something that Bioware can readily be blamed for, though, given that the first consumer tier multicore CPUs, the Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2, didn't get released till 2005. In 2002, when NWN1 came out, the only way to have more than one core would have been to have a very expensive workstation or server with two P6-architecture CPUs which very few gamers would be using)

To avoid this, tell Windows to pin the NWN1 process to a single CPU core.