I got partway into my first ever playthrough, and then decided to start over. Everything had worked just fine as far as I could tell. I had added a mod, so I did a complete uninstall, then a resinstall. It started out running just fine, but then in one play session, I got this choppy crap right from the get-go. Ever since, then, it's choppy when my people are walking or running. I restarted my PC, but no luck. I tried NWN 1 for comparison, and it's all good.

Any well-known issues that cause this? Lesser-known issues? Wild, random, totally unfounded theories?

1: There is a known problem that restarting your PC clears up (or apparently using the NWN2 client extension). I just did the restart when I noticed this and it worked for me, but if it isn't working for you, you could try the client extension, but if restart didn't fix it, I don't know if the client extension will.

2: The other issue is that NWN2 is more resource hungry than NWN1. Maybe you were running at lower res, without AA or other effects on you first try and now you have something turned up too high for your PC.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't change any settings of any kind.

Forgive my ignorance, but I am not sure of a couple of things.

1. What is AA as stated above?

2. What is the "client extension"?

AA is antialiasing.

This is the client extension. Use it. It does a lot of good for a lot of things.
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/other/nwn2-client-extension

Okay, so I installed the client extension, and it took care of the choppy scrolling. Now, however, I am noticing something else strange. Many of my enemies, during combat, slide to or from me, as if on skates. Their legs don't move. I don't recall that happening during my first few weeks of playing when I was having no troubles.

Does this sound familiar?

It's been a while. I don't remember that specifically.

Though I find animation more disconnected in NWN2. Like characters including PC are moonwalking. Their legs move, but not at the correct rate to match their speed.

NWN1 had much better connected animations.

I've seen it happen, rarely. I'd say you're unlucky to see it immediately, but as long as it's not happening often, I'd ignore it.

The "moonwalking" is not the same thing, and that's due to the fact that NWN2 supports scaling of any objects to any size, including creatures, unlike NWN1.

Thanks for your comments.

I have been re-reading the manual, and I did see that playing with the graphics settings might help. I'm running a pretty high res gaming laptop, so I'm not sure if that's a factor or not. Then again, NWN 1 looked/functioned great, as I mentioned.

I'd guess the information in the manual is a bit out of date by now and most of its suggestions wouldn't apply to a powerful gaming computer. I can tell you that you should be able to play it with full shadows and detail with at least 1920x1080, since that's how I run it with smooth performance. I do have antialiasing turned off, though. Between the two, I always choose good shadows and lighting over antialiasing if I have to choose.

I experienced this too. Was choppy but then I launched it with the client extension, worked PERFECTLY!

I got a gaming laptop so I'm like "There's NO WAY it's my computer", then launched it with client extension, boom. Magic.

I haven't had that but I get a lot of my character "teleporting". It mostly happens when I issue two commands in rapid succession. Tends to "fix" itself if I give a third ( that is, upon giving a third command I jump back to where I was). It's annoying, to be sure, but nowhere close to as bad as the game without the extension. That was just flat out unplayable.

This is often the case w/ older games, when things change when using newer OS's, software, drivers, etc etc. You never know what can go wrong when trying to run OLD games on NEWER stuff; on stuff it wasn't originally built & intended for.

You're likely going to need some kind of fix of some kind someone made (like say the NWN2 Client Extension) or a API-wrapper (for older DX versions - like say DXVK, DGVoodoo, NGlide, etc etc) just to make the game do stuff properly w. animations and whatnot.

So, for NWN2 - yeah; the Client Extension fixes the problem; and/or so does using the Jade Empire Stuttering Fix (if you are trying to not use the client extension).

Thank God for modders.