Just curious as to how far you set your distance with MGE? I aim for around 15 - 20 cells due to CPU limitations, but even then I get some serious chug in the forests of the TR mod.

How many cells do you set?

5, 'cause I feel that setting it higher makes Vvardenfell feel too small.

15-20? That's insane.

I set it to 3.

Thats barely enough to see all of Balmora

6 for me.

I set it to 2. Started at 3 but it seemed a bit much so I backed it off to 2.

The smog and ash is thick in Morrowind. Blame the mountain, not the player tourist.

For all those with low cell counts.. is that through aesthetic choice or CPU limitations?

Both.

In response to the comment about not being able to see all of Balmora: that's kind of the point. I want Morrowind to feel like a bigger place, not a smaller one. And setting distant land out any further than is required to eliminate "drawing" does nothing more than enhance that inherent flaw.

It's basically the same problem I have with companion mods: you've got people trying to shore up the game's shortcomings and are instead magnifying them. It's much better to focus on the game's stronger aspects than in areas where it will *never* succeed.

Choice.

Even if I had a much better setup, I'd spend it on more shaders and denser distant statics rather than on further view distance.

I have always been happy with my 15.

Purely aesthetic. I've got a pretty fair gaming laptop with a 2GB GT 750M graphics card, 8 GB of RAM and a 2.4 ghz (3.4 with a single core on turbo) Ivy Bridge i7 processor that could surely handle more than 2 cells of distant land. But, like BTB, I like the fog because it preserves the mystery of Morrowind.

5 cells - by choice. It seems to give me the balance I like. And, that still looks pretty good on the mainland.

I normally run 12 at the moment, but..like others here...I am contemplating lowering it a bit more. As you can see from my computer specs in my signature, I too could run with more if I wanted to. The view distance, as you can see from the other previous answers, is for many, just a personal choice thing.

I just check my MGXE settings. Apparently it's set to 30 cells. It doesn't feel small though?

round(playerlevel/7)
edit: just kidding, but 3/4 cells is too short if you levitate/jump high often, horizon is truncated at sea level
edit2: so, I'd say min. 3 until you levitate/jump a lot, then min. 6, min 7 is not bad for the horizon

Can you explain what you mean by denser distant statics? I mean what good are distant statics if you can see them from a distance?

I mean I would increase the distance in which they would render. Right now I have to cut them off fairly short due to the fact that I play on a laptop.

MGE XE, 50 cells + 4x AA. At worst ~45-49 FPS:

http://piclair.com/data/bs9m2.jpg

Extremely happy with the performance, has really upped my interested again for MW..

Any shader recommendations btw? Been ages since i messed with this game. I run these at the moment:

http://piclair.com/data/f14zj.jpg

What graphics card you use to run that high?

I just re-arranged my shader chain http://www.tesvskyrim.com/screenshot-2405-1 based on an old post by Abot I stumbled across a few days ago.

There are also a number of interesting shaders in http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1462188-mge-xe-shaders-library-and-development/.

GTX Titan, though the heavily overclocked i7 helps too. Also, having a ton of RAM is actually useful now (Win 7) since if you have enough the whole game gets loaded into it (like a RAM-drive), no loading times is pretty nice (and RAM Is quite cheap). Not sure it does anything for performance in MW other than loading times though..

Thanks for the link!

And how does it run when you're in a town, i.e. Balmora, with a mod such as Starfires NPC Additions, with more clutter and without distant textures that look rubbish?

IMO a tweaked vingette that's extremely subtle as well as film grain and Apel's Gamma Correction shader go a loong way. I also tweaked sunshafts so that they show up when the sun isn't on screen and that makes a big difference too.

Define ton of ram please. lol At the time I built this thing 5 years ago...the 16GB of ram it has was a ton of ram. I also use the LAA (4GB) patch on Morrrowind.exe, and I still have loading stuttering, only momentary...but it is there. *shrugs*

I only have 8 and I get along fine.. the graphics card makes the biggest difference as far as I've noticed though. Especially if you're trying to run the game with MGE.