FPS drop while fighting dragons.

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Started playing BG II again and was hoping this wouldn't happen this time considering my computer is nearly state of the art (though my last computer was more then overqualified for BG, but it still happened on that one as well).

Whenever fighting a dragon, any dragon and only dragons, my fps will drop significantly (to 3-4'ish).
I'm fairly certain that it's not mod-related.
The game runs perfectly fine otherwise.
Curiously enough if the dragon is facing a certain way (possibly south, but I can't recall atm) the game runs fine, and if I'm offscreen from it the game will run fine as well, even though I'm fighting it, so this could indicate that it's a visual problem with rendering the model.
Vista x64

Anyone else experienced this?
Fixable?

 

Possibly. Which video card are you using? Is it the same brand (ATi or nVidia) as the old one? I noticed, when I was using an ATi video card, I had lag problems with dragons and certain spell effects (glitterdust, IIRC, but it was a while ago). On the other hand, upgrading my RAM while keeping the ATi card also got rid of the problem. Vista could also be the culprit, or at least redirect the cause, as well.

 

I have no idea to the cause of this problem as I never experienced it even in my too many modded games.

If you are truly frustrated and have to kill a dragon badly, you can change the appareance, ingame avatar of the dragon via Shadow Keeper:edit the dragon's CRE file to set its apparence to a human fighter, for example, so you can still fight a dragon 'in human shape'. I have no idea what this might do to its special abilities ie:breath weapon and wing buffet attacks, I think it should not cause much trouble, you don't change the script or abilities at all, just the graphical apparence. So it shouldn't lag when you fight. One bad side though, the dragon now will have better maneuver ability for having a smaller avatar and you can not 'flank' it to attack from different sides once again due to small size. Hey this might actually make the battles more challenging, hmm

 

I'm using an ATi card, yes, and my last computer had one as well. It's not a huge problem, it's just annoying and.. odd, also I had a feeling that it was a somewhat common problem since I've experienced it on two different computers, but alas, it seems I am alone.

I will check if glitterdust causes similar issues, but I probably won't bother with changing the model (even though this would probably fix the issue).
PS. even after the dragon is dead, if it died facing a lagging direction, which is nearly any direction except one or maybe two, the game will lag as long as it's onscreen.

 

Uh, sounds to me like a buffer problem. The game might think that there isn't enough memory to store the dragon sprite (it is quite big after all) and thus starts swapping data between video memory and main memory, causing the delay. How much memory does your video card have? (Also, are you sure the game is recognising the ATI card along with its Direct3D features?)

I think there are some optimisations for sprite memsize in the BG2 configuration, something with the words mirror and sprites? You could toggle that and see what happens, I am quite interested in the effect.

Let me guess, the directions with the smallest screen surface?

 

Correct. Directly south and north if my memory serves me right. I could post my specs and try some of your tips later today, when I get home from work.

 

Perhaps run it in compatibility mode (XP 2003)? I was having all sorts of problems until I did that.

 

I fooled around with the 3D-settings, basically turning them all on, and the problem is now, as they say, history.