Just curious what's going on here. My memory (512 ddr-333) is hardly being tapped, (200meg+ unused, zero swap file) yet the cpu (duron 1200) is running at 100% on many of the maps in Icewind dale HoW and trials of luremaster. Other new games like WC3 don't even push the system, I can have 4 other apps open in background, but for some reason I'm experiencing some choppiness on big maps in HoW/TotL. Does this game engine just happen to use alot of cpu and little memory? Or is there something I should change?

Thanks,
Bianca

Not sure!

In your system properties --> performace you could check to see that you virtual memory and performance is set to a maximum. You can also do system maintenace to clean up useless files, and defrag the harddrive. Other than that not much.

It should basically run the same with as without the expansion.

Basic housekeeping is a must, and you could also try the configuration utility to see if you can monkey about with the game's settings. Probably a redundant question, but is it patched up to date (though with HoW, I'd suspect it is).

Nah the machine is very clean, runs super fast with other brand new games, recent xp install, nothing running in background. It only seems to occur when the game is aware of several npcs who are pathing, such as feared from turn undead or something. I'm on burial isle now and it just happened again, feared two wights off and suddenly the machine starts chugging, runs very fast in every other circumstance. Just wierd that this older game is taxing it. Windows is managing the vm, I think they took the conservativeswapfileusage option out with xp, can't find it in registry. I was told with xp I should go back to windows managing VM instead of setting min/max, was this bad advice?

Thanks for the replies though, it isn't a game ruining thing, just annoying.

Bianca

You have the game setup to pre-cache the entire map correct?
This can really dig into your preformance if not configured properly.

<font color=silver>There are a number of places in HOW and TOL where the game seems to run slow on some machines. This is apparently in some cases due to the number of ambient sounds in certain areas in addition to large numbers of creatures. Try disabling some or all of the ambient sounds when playing through those areas and consider turning off EAX - the environmental audio </font>

ive found that after a bit of decent gaming its not uncommon for IWD to gobble up 250 to 300 mb of system ram.
actual CPU usage is allways 100%, regardless of what you are doing, and in big battles things tend to slow down, even with 1500Mhz of AMD XP juice.

Cyril is right about the ambient sounds. There is also a problem that is caused by the monster AI trying to path to you to inititiate combat, and in some areas, like Burial Isle, the game will REALLY lag. Try turning off all ambient sounds (as Cyril suggested) AND turn of as much feedback as possible - that will speed up the game when the spells start flying.