I need some serious help and was wondering if any of you computer wizards could help. Whenever I try to play BG2, it runs very sluggish and jerky. I have tried the game with the patch and without, both with the same results. I have also reinstalled it 6 times (single, full and recommended) and it's still the same.

I have a 566mhz machine and I've tried the settings on 533mhz and 450 mhz, but that doesn't help. I don't think i have a video card, unless the computer came installed with one (Compaq Presario, I have no clue, I'm a computer idiot. I played BG1 on a crappy 200mhz Macintosh and it ran a lot smoother than BG2 is playing on my PC, which makes no sense to me. If anyone has any ideas or can point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it. Feel free to email me at wolverinebluz4@aol.com or post your responses.

Thank a bunch...

Abbadon? From curse of the Spawn ;)
Well dude I'm not sure, but maybe you don't have a video card. As far as I know, it's supposed to say something like whether you have the minimum requirements or not.

1) Sometimes big gameslike BG2 don't work well with integrated video-cards. If that is the case, you might want to install a new set of drivers for you video-card. If that doesn't help, you'll have to buy yourself another graphic accelerator.
2) It can be the issue about caching, RAM and the priority yu set for your applications. What system do you have? If it is Win2K you can go to the Task Manager while BG2 is running and set its priority to be the highest.
3) Before you do that try to reconfigure your BG2 manually: adjust the frame rate, resolution, etc. (run the configuration program and go to "Graphics" and "Advanced").

If you have any friends that are good with the computer, have them come to your place and take a look at your machine. It is very hard to advise anything without seeing the computer.

Hope that helped at least a bit.

[This message has been edited by Modjahed (edited April 21, 2001).]

Also, be sure to close programs/processes that might be "stealing" system resources. Many icons in the system tray is a bad thing.

Run the config utility that comes with the game and spend at least 10 minutes in it to familiarize yourself with all the options. Then start turning off anything that might slow the game down; like 3d support and enhanced pathfinding (both are totally useless and slow the game immensely) and most of the gameplay options (you can read the description of what each one does).
Also set your cache as high as you can afford and set Tiles Precache to 100%. This is the most important of all settings.

After that, simply test how much options you can leave on until your system starts clogging. It will take you about half an hour to figure it all out, but it's worth it, since you'll only be doing it once and you'll be playing the game for 200 hours... ;)

[This message has been edited by Taluntain (edited April 21, 2001).]

Many of me abbil experienced this problem and I have deducted the cause:
-Intel810/E Whitney embedded video adapter
This device be the video card simulator and even the best machines run bg2 bad on it, with no difference whether ye use max settings or lower it to 640x480 for P233
I guess if ye want to play, buy a two-meg old card and add it to PCI port
Even this low of a videocard wouldn't have embedded adapter's problem with activating memory to cache gfx

Enjoy!

[This message has been edited by ayecapitan (edited April 21, 2001).]

Looks as if everyone covered most of the bases here. And agreed it's always difficult to diagnose a computer via the 'internet virtual world'.

I have supported many of Compaq's business models... not the Presario. However I do believe it's a graphics adapter issue. One thing you may want to try quickly is to go to the configure option of the BG2 game and select the tab that deals with "static animations". You may wish to check the 2 items that deal with this (disabling them). If your game plays smoothly afterwards then it it's the graphics adapter. Which for the Compaq Presario's could be embedded or it's the 'shared with Ram' graphics adapter. Dunno.

I believe your processor is fine, this game is not that process intensive. The chip cache, Windows cache and game cache are most likely not an issue. OS's aren't a prob with this game either. However, I actually installed BG2 on a Win ME computer once and it played slightly slower than on one of my NT systems. So I switched back to NT.

...Now I'm playing with POWER!!!

Thank you all, the problems are solved. For those interested, here what the problems were.

1. As directed by Talunatain (sorry if I spelled it wrong, I changed my Tiles precache to 100%.

2. Turned off my extended pathfinding.

3. I had added the Debug Mode to the Baldur.ini, but had put it in as Debugmode.

All is well and I appreciate all your help. Now onto playing after 5 days of racking my brain over this.

I'm glad you got things straightened out. This is way too good of a game to miss out just because of tech problems. Have fun!