Alright, you didn't even try on that troll attempt. The Riva TNT2 was a venerable card for its time (it pretty much blew the 3DFx Voodoo2 out of the water and, IMO, was actually better than the Voodoo3 in real world practice given in particular that the Voodoo3 really sucked at anything > 16bpp) but it isn't even from the same time era as NWN. For NWN you needed an 8th or 9th generation Geforce card for truly smooth gameplay and even then got some drops. Preferably at least the Geforce 6800 nu (non-ultra.) Of course the ultra would be better, but that one got great settings out of the game and almost never crashed. NWN MIGHT have been playable with a TNT2 (it didn't explicitly require shaders, merely benefited from them) but you would have seen closer to 5 FPS tops with very frequent crashes at best. Speaking from experience, NWN's original engine tended to crash frequently when framerates went that low (that game hated ATi cards. I had a Radeon 9600 Pro when I first got NWN and while it generally handled fairly well, if things got too busy it could crash and framerates were never great. Later on I had a Radeon X850XT-PE because I wasn't ready to buy a whole new motherboard -- which would also have meant CPU at the time -- to go to PCI-E at the time and the X850XT-PE was the most powerful thing ever to come to AGP mostly by sheer brute force more than anything else. NWN actually managed to make that X850XT-PE fall to its knees begging for mercy on a few modules...) To give you an idea of how far off you are on scale, a Geforce 6800 is probably approximately 700 times more powerful than the TNT2. I had my 6800 nu overclocked, cores unlocked, and the VRAM at lower latencies (essentially turning it into almost a 6800 Ultra) and NWN still struggled at times. Speaking of which, which CPU are you claiming to have run NWN on? You would pair a TNT2 with an early era Pentium 3 -- 450MHz or so probably. Even the Xbox 1 (one, not One) the engine (KOTOR) had major load times and lots of frame drops and it had a 733MHz Celeron (alright, that even lower than normal for a Celery stick L2 crippled it a lot, but it still would beat out a 450MHz P3) and a souped up Geforce 3 (roughly equivalent to the GTS probably, though I hear it had some backported GF4 improvements, so for all that the CPU sucked so much the GPU was actually pretty impressive for its time.) But back then with a game like this you were used to and accepted some framerate drops. The game might technically run on something like a Geforce 4 or even a Geforce 3 or maybe even a Geforce 4 MX (actually a GF2, but that hot mess is a different discussion,) but it absolutely would not have run well. A TNT2 isn't even on the map.
Also, I don't think you even remember what mods were for NWN. We're not talking about modifying graphics settings or something. We're talking about adding in whole game worlds. Even potentially rule changes in some. (I once played one that tried to modify in the 3.5e rules and seemed to do a pretty decent job of it IMO. I think I even recall seeing one that added in god levels -- aka greater than 40.) I suppose it would be possible to downscale textures, but with the way textures handle these days I doubt it would even make a 1 FPS difference if you lowered them while it sure would get ugly. In fact, you can modify some graphics settings it seems (the settings files can be edited inside the save filesystem,) but most things are disabled anyway it seems (I wondered why my disabling DOF made so little difference. It actually already is off, lol.) The problems you're complaining about are how the engine implements things as a whole and would require a complete rewrite of significant portions from scratch (which is not what Beamdog does or ever pretended to do.)
No, we know you did not play this game on a TNT2 at all. However, I will state absolutely that whatever you did play it on did still experience framerate drops and you just didn't pay attention because it didn't matter. It wasn't about maximizing the numbers, it was about enjoying a good game. Back then. You didn't need 1000 FPS or super realistic graphics barely discernible from life, you needed a game that offered good content. That is what NWN delivered then and it didn't suddenly remove all that it did since then. You are judging a port of a really old game today as if it were made today, but it is a port, not a game that was made today. This isn't The Elder Scrolls: The Hyper-Realstic VR Chronicles, this is NWN.
I haven't really had time to seriously experiment with it, but I'm thinking it might be possible they've simply moved it all. For now I managed to downgrade my game (not easy, don't ask) and will be really careful about updating it again until I'm absolutely ready. The update changed the game around to go along with the DLC though. The DLC has added language folders (en, pl, etc etc) in the root of the romfs (which means the update must have changed the game to use that since the DLC won't work without it.) My suspicion is that the data has to move to your game's respective language folder (probably en in most of our cases.) What I'm not sure about is if folder structure even remains intact. They placed their languag-specific dialog.tlk files directly in the data folder in each language instead of in a tlk folder. Hopefully if they did just simply move it the folder structure otherwise remains intact. If not, it may be worth trying just dumping all the files directly into that folder and seeing if it works, but I really really hope that isn't the case. Alternately it may even be that they just use a different structure entirely. For example, maybe instead of /data/whatever it's just /whatever with the /language/data actually just being a hardcoded override specific to just dialog.tlk. I'm guessing if you're using some modules that you have them in your user save though? It may still use those folders. Unless one redirect saves to SD (which, last I heard was still buggy wasn't it?) this means you have to load all mod files into the NAND and if you ever want anything that uses the CEP you're looking at losing a lot of space to it. At least we know the Switch doesn't freak out on large amounts of save data. Dragon Quest Builders 2 created a huge > 1GiB save (I think 1.5 or so, but I forget) and no problems there apparently.
Unfortunately, right now I just don't have the time or energy to really test it out. Most of what the update and DLC adds you can manually add in anyway. I have the modules the DLC adds from the GoG version and it seems to be ok with those, so I use them instead of the DLC. I did copy over some of their override files for the "low resolution" dialog font and it is definitely better than the original. They should have overridden the game's standard font for the Switch version from day one, but I guess they just didn't think of it since it looked mostly ok on PC.
Actually, funny thing about this back and forth... The actual setting to multiply the GUI's size by 2 doesn't exist in the original game's menus and was added in the update. However, if you load the settings files from a post-update save then most of the GUI actually will appropriately scale except for a couple of windows or so. Given that the settings file is just a plain text file more or less duplicated from the PC version I'm sure one can actually edit the specific line for that (but it gets a bit tiring going back and forth between the Switch and PC, so I didn't bother find that exact line for now since copying the settings file was sufficient.)
If you have the time, could you test this out? In particular especially test the moved data folders. You can just move the files over without too much fuss to be under the language folder and see what happens.
Oh I already undid they update sorry mate. Honestly though, I really don't see a reason to update since we are all using modded switches, we cant even play multiplayer anyway and as you say, we can add everything from the PC version anyway so I'm not sure why we should even bother with the update haha. Cheers for all your investigation though, This fourm will serve people well when they wanna find out about modding the game on switch.