EDIT: SOLVED, I have to pause Kaspersky Internet Security to play the IE games properly.

Has anyone had a hassle-free experience with Baldur's Gate 2 on a i3, i5, or i7 processor? I have played BG several times on older, slower machines using the Intel duo-core and singles before that, no problem, modded and vanilla, with and without dedicated graphics. And it was fast and quick on all.

I currently have an i5, and BG runs on a single core and pegs it out at maximum usage. In-game, movement occurs at a slight lag - I imagine people new to the game might think it's standard. It is not. Lag in the inventory screen is more noticeable; placing and removing items is fugly.

Save/load times are significantly increased over the older machines (by a factor of three-five over my old dell e1405 ). Opening menus are the worst, ESPECIALLY the in-game "Options" menu. On old installs I never thought twice about clicking it, the menu opened within a fraction of a second. Now it's 15 seconds. Ugh.

I have dinked around with all the relevant settings: installed to c:\games\bg2, run as administrator, various compatibiity settings, disabling 3d acceleration, various performance benchmarks, fullscreen, windowed, official resolutions, widescreen, removing folder from windows defender scans, adding exe to antivirus trusted list (Kaspersky btw), BLT settings, I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

Anyway, the game is playable, but the lag in everything is adding up and aggravating me. Similar experiences?

Thanks for any info!

Off to try a fresh reinstall.

I have an i5 processor too and BG 2 runs fine for me, though it's the DVD version, not GOG's.

Have you done a complete install? Installed any mods?

Yeah, modded and unmodded. No luck with either. My mods are generally tweaks at most, so affecting regular gameplay is extremely unlikely. My previous installs were disc-based, too.

In using the GOG installation, there is no "complete" or "minimum" installation like when using the discs. The GOG installation is necessarily complete.

So, I'm going to try a disc-based install next and see how that performs.

Running it now on an i7 hexcore and it runs fine. I did have some problems with it crashing to desktop, but the widescreen mod solved that problem, This is the gog install.

Yeah, this can't be processor related.

SOLVED

Nope, not processor related.

Kaspersky Internet Security is the culprit. Paused protection, and all the IE games ran like a dream. No stutter, lag, long load or save times. Lightning quick all around.

That was frustrating, but am happy is resolved.