Specifically, MGE shader problems. Was going to post this in the MGE topic, but I figured this would turn out to be more of a "rate my system" topic than about MGE. Anyways, I've found my computer just won't do distant land. Tried a bunch of different settings, some better than others but overall unacceptable so I've pretty much lost hope in that. Now I'm trying to run shaders and I find myself asking: is my computer THAT bad? Since I don't use distant land, I'm using FPS Optimizer to increase the view distance. I've tried a lot of different shaders, but the latest attempt was Bloom 3 sm 1.1 Basic by itself. Like all the others I tried, the screen fogged up to about Morrowind's default max. I've played around with MGE's settings, and the shader seems to really be the only culprit. The game runs great (no forced fog, good FPS) with Optimizer and my regular MGE settings with HDR and shader variables on, but when I add one shader everything fogs up and gets a little choppy. I have a GeForce 310m 2.2 dual core i5 laptop, updated drivers, optimized my system and ini... I just find it hard to believe I can't run a sm 1.1 shader >.> Does this sound fishy to you guys or is my GPU just not up to the task?

On an unrelated note, I can't get my FPS to show in-game. I enable it in the ini, but I don't see it... I heard it's on the lower right corner, but I have a minimap there. Is that there in the regular game, and could it be blocking it? How do I get rid of it?

Would it be possible for you to post screen shots of each tab of MGE?

As for shaders, you should be able to run a few quite reasonably. Maybe you've set things too high when running the distant land wizard?

As for FPS showing in game. Alot of people won't agree with me, but i personally prefer to use FRAPS. It's accurate, easily configurable, and it can give you an FPS display of any direct3d or OpenGL app

I face the same issue on my i5 ASUS laptop using a ATI Mobility Radeon 5470 with 1GB vram and 4GB memory. Shaders will simply kill my already shaky FPS. I always figured that they need to tone down the capacity on these laptop graphics cards in order for them not to overheat. Although most other games seem to run fine.

I don't have any useful suggestions, as I myself gave up using shaders on this computer.

Shaders destroy my desktop version 7600 gt. Simply enabling the shader option kills it. Don't know if that is relevant or unexpected but there it is.

Thank you guys for reassuring me I'm not the only one, maybe it is just us I got the FPS to work, it was a problem with Windows 7 so I moved Morrowind to a folder on my desktop and now it works fine. So I did some tests with a macro to enable and disable shaders with the 1.1 bloom, and I got interesting results. Without the shader on, I get around 40-50 FPS. As soon as the shader comes on, my FPS drops straight down to low 30s/20s without FPS optimizer. This isn't that bad although inconsistent, but when FPS optimizer comes on it creates fog. I'd rather play with shaders off than have 20 FPS and a shorter view distance. Still, the readme says it should case a 0-2 FPS hit =/ But I don't understand what could be wrong other than my system.

last time I was into all that mge setup thingy, I could choose different shaders and bechmark them directly in the mge setup,it gave some indications on fps ingame.

not perfect since it is other factors as well, which mods you otherwise use and on and on, it helped me for sure.

MGE limits Morrowind's view distance to 7218 units in exteriors when distantland is enabled and will override any extra view distance set thru FPSO.

To test this in-game you can setup a toggle key for distantland and two keys to increase / decrease view distance thru MGEgui's Macro Editor. Make sure to enable 'Display messages' option under MGEgui >> 'Render state' tab >> 'Options' section so you can get message status of the actual view distance MGE is allowing.