@AndrueD - Well, the DirectX might have something to do with something, but from everything I can see, NWN's graphical performance really has the most to do with OpenGL. Because NWN uses OpenGL. This aspect of it has, unfortunately, always caused problems or at least complications. What happened is when Bioware was making NWN, they were working very closely with NVidia. And so when it came to how they chose to draw things on the screen, they used the "NVidia way". So when people ran NWN on ATI machines, performance wasn't typically up to snuff. So Bioware sort of redid things and tried to make both work decently. But this situation got even more complicated because ATI doesn't really do that great a job with OpenGL, on their end, either. Fast forward years and years later, to today, and when it comes to shinywater (and not, say, run-of-the-mill graphics stuff that NWN does, and which both NVidia and ATI do fine), it's a real toss-up what's going to happen on a given machine. I have two computers to test ideas out on but getting feedback from the community about how NWN is actually playing with a given setting (in this case with shinywater) is super informative. If NWN used DirectX for drawing things on the screen, all this mess would be so much simpler.
@Thayan - Perfect! Yep! Thanks for going the extra mile with the screenshot. That's exactly what you should be seeing and if that's coming in at anything over 40FPS, especially, that's telling me a lot about why NWN might be behaving poorly under some conditions. BTW, if you're into this sort of thing, I'm assuming that the big difference between your card and mine is probably in the drivers and what the cards actually support versus what has to be done on the CPU. That any "modern" card is getting the kind of performance you are says some good things about how much support (at least in your specific card & drivers, but also NVidia) some of the funkier/clunkier graphics functions of NWN still have on modern pc's.
@Gruftlord - Yep, the shadows system in NWN is really accurate (for shadows in a 3D game) and also really "expensive". Raw polygons don't seem to be don't seem to be, though. The big dip when loading horses and PC's can mostly be attributed to uncompiled models and, because NWN draws basically everything you're looking at (whether it's behind something or not), anytime you're not using the default camera angle (i.e. console command "unlockcamera 0"), you're going to get slowdown ranging from "unfortunate" to "unplayable". BTW, what kind of FPS are you getting with shiny water on in an area, generally? Or do you not notice any kind of hit, at all?
