Ok, so upon seeing a comment a comment about SWG's sky textures that someone has never had a problem with hi-res textures, I then thought about lag and framerate in general. Why has there been no general advice thread for this? On the various causes of framrate being sapped or gained and advice on hardware. We continually see threads that ask advice on running MW with "insert computer or textures here". I think having one of these threads would probably help people in general understand these things better, so I say that we should compile the various things together.
The major point of this is to help point out that no graphics mods are going to kill your computer(made a comment about this and someone agreed a few days ago) but there is plenty of knowledge in general that could be helpful to people.

I do realize that framerate does entirely depend on a specific person's computer system. However, that doesnt mean different things arnt generally true. I do think that a thread like this would likely have to be updated every now and then, but even with the pace of technology, I would think no more then even once a year. I will start with some stuff, please feel free to correct me/add more info about framerate and mods and hardware.

First a statement.
One of the best things you can probably do to figure out what works best and doesnt kill your framerate is to test things yourself, but the questions and answers below should serve at least as a guide.

The first thing I post is the one thing that many people seem to not know and always ask.
Will newer textures kill my framerate?
Short answer is NO, if you have a video card.
There is a widespread misconception that adding updated textures will slow framerate. Updated textures will simply not do this. If you have a computer made in the last 5 years, you arnt going to find any textures that will "kill your computer".
In regards to actual sizes, most replacers dont have anything above 1024x1024 for textures, any computer today would be fine with this size. Even using a few textures 2048x2048 and up is fine, but you simply arnt going to find many that size as of this date(April 2011) If you do however somehow start adding lots of really huge textures(2048+), then depending on your computer, this could slow you down, finding that many huge textures at this time however is unlikely.
Without a video card, even textures have been known to slow framerate.
Here is an simple explanation on how textures get moved about on your computer:
The videocard caches the textures it needs in its VRAM. If you turn round and look at something else, and the texture isn't already cached by the graphics card (or has been removed to make room for something else), it has to be sent to the graphics card by the CPU. MW can only use one processor, this takes time in which it's not computing other game functions, but more importantly the new texture has to be retrieved from disk, which is the speed bottleneck. The bigger the texture, the more time it takes to transfer. Now you're fine until you look at something else not cached by the graphics card.
The extra time taken by bigger textures isn't really to do with the card rendering, that's massively parallel and easily accomplished by modern cards, it's getting textures into the card. That's dependent on your hard disk access time, primarily, so apart from having as much VRAM on your graphics card as possible to minimise texture reloads (you can get 2GB cards if your wallet is deep enough), upgrading your hard disk is likely to help most. Solid state drives(SSD's) are the best way to go for this, but are still fairly expensive.
If you dont have a videocard, then your regular ram will of course be used.
On one more thing, I have heard of a glitch where if Morrowind tries to load textures and they are all 1024x1024, it will load none of them; I will have to find more info on this.

I want to use model replacers in my game so things will look better/smoother. Will this slow me down?
Unlike with textures, the answer to this isnt as simple as meshes can vary a great deal. However, there are a couple things you can go by one of which would require looking at the model's poly number. In general though, the more polys something has, the more computer power it requires to be rendered. Before getting into poly counts however, if you dont want to use very many mesh replacers, then you shouldnt have much to worry about. You can skip the stuff below if you dont want to deal a little more indepth with models; all you really need to know is that the more replacers you add, the more computer power will be required and as of today, anyone with a decent computer(even one without a video card) would be fine with a few replacers; few as in a model here or there, like several weapons or something like that, adding Vality's Bitter Coast trees or something that covers alot of area or appears many times in one place definitly counts as more then a few. Morrowind renders everything in a scene regardless if you can see it or not in the direction you are looking; This will slow your framerate.(possibly wrong, needs testing) As always, you can test out yourself what you think you computer can handle.
On the other hand if you decide you want to get all the tree replacers and grass growers and something that replaces lots of furnature, then read on.(think of Vality's Bitter Cost mod or grass placements as something that needs power) Below are a couple examples of the number of polys used for different things:
Years 2001-02
Half-Life, Dreamcast, (2000-2001) (Canned)
-Zombie - 1649 polygons

Half-Life, PS2
-Zombie - 2822 (Highest LOD)

Halo, Xbox
-Masterchief - 2,000 polygons

Morrowind, PC
-Frost Atronach - ~1,600 polygons - plus bones, etc
-Tavern - 1188 polygons - plus 120 polygon collision mesh
-Dwarven Claymore - 400 polygons

Fast forward to 2006
Oblivion, PC
Farmhouse ~2100 ploygons, includes collision mesh, about half the size as the tavern

and 2007
Mass Effect, X360
-Sheppard + armor + weapons - ~20,000-25,000 polygons

Lost planet, X360/PC
-Wayne - 12392 polygons (but finally 17765 polygons for compatibility with motion blur effect)
-VS robot - 30-40,000 polygons
-Background - ~500,000 polygons

As you can see, polys for games have increased since Morrowind came out, but you probably wonder what exactly this means for you. Well, this help establishes what a good estimate of how many polys something should have for this point in time. In addition to the above figures, something like a tree replacer used in MW today(as of April 2011) can come out at about 2k polys and these replacers are widely used and no one has any problems with them.
Models being replaced by a models that have 4x the number of polys as the original are likely to be ok today. You can see in the time that passed the number of polys used for a main character increased by about 10x, where the Master Chief had 2000 polys and Shepard had up to over 10x that number.(yes different model/game, but both the main character of a game) This could certainly be looked at as a higher count and shouldnt be used as the rule as many main characters for games have an increased amount of polys for better detail since you will be seeing them most often and most importantly, typically only one of them will be seen at a time. In any case, you could consider something like a weapon being definitively on the high side for number of polys if its a sword that has say, 20000 polys. That is definitly a bit high for something like a sword where if it had something like 1000-2000 polys would be much more reasonable. In the case of characters like NPCs, poly counts of 3000-10000 could be typical today and would be perfectly acceptable(this assumes a decent computer).
The final point is that a good poly count will depend on what the model is and how often it appears in a single given area. If its something that can appear a number of times, then it should have a lower poly count then something that would only appear once.
As technology and computers become more powerful, the number of polys used will increase however. So you do eventually have to get a more powerful computer.

Can I run Morrowind with integrated graphics(without a videocard)?...
With a more recent computer, you can run MW without a graphics card.
However, one of the most important peices of hardware today you can have for playing any games is a dedicated graphics card. There is no way to get around this, no driver tricks or anything like that will work. The reason for a video/graphics card, or as they are known to many, a GPU(graphics processing unit), is for raw calculations of data such as where a pixel would appear on your screen. Graphics cards are good at doing this and this is their primary job, they are made for this. As an example to show just how useful they are, I believe it was six PS3's that were used by one professor for their GPUs to make a cheap super computer. Without a GPU, your computer processor and integrated graphics has to do all the work itself and it doesnt have as many resources allocated(nor even as good a physical structure such as internal memory, etc) to the task of doing that compared to a card. So in addition to running the basic tasks on your OS(operating system), it now has to do this as well. This all means your framerate will not be as high as it would with a graphics card.
Another thing to note is that Morrowind will only use one processor and is not equiped to take advantage of more then one, this is one thing that tends to bottleneck the processes of the game on today's multicore systems.
...and still use something like MGE(Morrowind Graphics Extender)?
The short answer is a definitive NO.

Wait, whats this? Scripting effects framerate?
Its true.
This is another area that effects framerate that many people either are not aware of, arn't curious, or seem to know already(always see graphics questions and never anything about scripts and framerate).
Scripting can have a large impact on your framerate. The more you run, the more power it takes for you computer to run through them all. As an example, I am pretty typical, I run quite a few mods and a couple of them run scripts all the time, such as a certain music mod. Altogether, the scripts helped to cut my framerate in half in some places, without them however, I would pretty regularly max out at ~61fps in many indoor cells(compared to ~30 with many scripts). Before it was updated, this certain music mod script sapped about 5-10fps from me and it plus the others are what cut my fps down. With scripts, the effect on framerate can be subtle, but it does add up. A script running music here, a script monitoring NPCs there and before ya know it, you have lost 10-20fps. The major point here is that only you can say how many scripts are too many.
The other major point here is that it is largely up to the modders to make sure that scripts run well and dont take too many resources. Going back to that music mod I mentioned, after the modder optomized the script it used, it cut its effect on my fps down to 2-4.

Does sound effect framerate?
The answer here can be yes, but its also the scripts that make the sounds play which effect it.
Having a dedicated sound card will speed things up as opposed to having the built in things handle it.

Lights effect frame rate too?
Yes again.
This should be something modders should know too. Adding alot of lighting will decrease framerate and you dont have to see these lights to feel the effect, all you have to do is look in their direction and it can slow you even if view is blocked by a wall or something else. Lighting, unlike many statics, has a few extra things involved with it, these can be shadows, flickering, etc. The smaller the light, the less impact it will have as there isnt as much power needed to render it. As with scripts, lighting can be a thing that adds up over time, you add a mod with lighting here and another then and soon you are choking on lights. I think of a couple mods in particular here.
Once again though, this is something that can be largely helped by good modding practices.


Hmm, I think I will stop there for now, I wrote a bit more then I thought I would.(college taught me some habits like that) Please add to this, I know there is more that can be covered which I did not mention. Perhaps this can be made into a single document and released as well if people dont think a sticky would be good. I have never seen this amount of info posted anywhere before, at least all in one spot. This is usually stuff people end up learning from lots of different ways from places scattered about. This sort of document would have been useful to me when I first started.

What mods have been known to effect framerate?
More later!

A list of any mods designed to specifically increase framerate would be helpful.

A month or so back, one of the big-name modders (Fliggerty?) mentioned they had a private mod they'd written which did something with the script for the swaying banners outside, which was very beneficial for framerates (especially somewhere like Balmora). I meant to ask about it at the time and wondered why such a useful thing hadn't been publicly released for everyone to benefit... If it's more of a script fix than a tweak then it ought to be incorporated into the Patch Project anyway. But that's the sort of very useful mod which this thread could highlight and maybe encourage to be written/released.

I think a sticky could be useful for users, but a document could be added to the revamp of the Morrowind Mod Makers Bible, perhaps. So, no vote, as nothing fits.

Does having a lot of global variables have any affect on performance? I know a lot of mods use them to customize certain portions of a script from a menu in-game.

Actually there is a document choice.

No, I mean that I choose both, and there isn't an option for that.

I voted for released document, although I would've voted for both options as Arsuru would've if that was available instead.

I always thought it was odd that OB's textures effect framerate where MW's don't. I could be wrong here though and OB's might work the same as MW's do - I've never really looked into it very thoroughly.

Something relating to the polly count of meshes a lot of people might not know. Darknut stated somewhere - I believe he discovered this while creating his Dagoth Ur dungoen revamp mod - that the maximum allowed number of faces per interior cell is 1 million. Once you hit 1 million trying to enter the interior cell will crash your game, so interior cells should usually be kept down at around say 950,000 faces maximum to prevent this. This doesn't necessarily mean having so many faces in 1 interior cell would cause a massive fps hit though. I haven't tested whether or not 1 million faces in an exterior cell would also cause the game to crash, but I don't see why it wouldn't if the interiors work that way. Players will experience fps hits in cells nearing that 1 million limit though I believe. The severity of it would probably depend on how high end your computer is though.

I just edited it to allow more then one choice. Im gone to bed now.

I see no reason to have it stickied. You made a great thread, and it won't be ignored now, but instead remain active with conversation.
Once stickied, no one will ever see it

You could always post it at GHF in the http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/custom_page.php so it will remain available forever.

Thanks for the thread. There was a really great Benchmarking thread that was around for a long time (including detailed testing of FPS in every scenario) but it seems to have been pruned.

Actually I was looking for that and meant to mention it. Thats more evidence that textures will not effect framerate, but it had more to do with MGE rather then in general.

I will be sure to start editing the first post later today hopefully, just need more people to start adding knowledge to here and asking more questions which can be added along with answers

Isn't the framerate more depending on the Hardware the Player use to play the modded game?

I think such list is difficult to make because if you run a powerful PC you won't have FPS Troubles against someone who use a 8 - 10 year old computer who will have a slide show?

Might be a nice idea to list mods that WILL affect framerate. Not to make judgement since alot of those are the best mods around. Just to let people know that that mod will come at the cost of some FPS.

Thats the thing though, there are lots of people who dont have powerful computers and thay are the ones who ask these sorts of questions.



Yea, probably. Anyone can feel free to help with this.

I think it's important to recognize a couple of things:

1. Frame rate is limited because you are either CPU- or GPU-bound. In other words, either your CPU is too taxed and your GPU (graphics card) is idling, or your CPU is idling and it's your GPU that's too taxed. Most likely both are not at a 100% workload. It is inaccurate to just call a mod "slow"; you should instead distinguish CPU and GPU consumption.

I have a list somewhere in this forum somewhere of a few mods with heavy scripting, IIRC Fireflies Invade Morrowind was the worst. But since I just found a problem (my Morrowind.exe had Run As Administrator turned off) that was causing Morrowind / MGE XE to not use the correct resolution, my resolution has gone up massively and now I'm far more worried about GPU problems!

2. Computing the difference in fps is not a great way of judging performance impact. If each frame takes 20 ms and you are running at 50 fps, then if you add a mod that takes up an extra 20 ms you will have a massive drop from 50fps to 25 fps. But, if you are already taking 200ms per frame (5 fps), then your fps will only change slightly from 5 fps to 4.44 fps. The best thing to do is to take the reciprocal of fps, e.g. deal with frame duration in milliseconds, and compare those differences instead.

This such a lie. One or two textures don't make a difference but from experience I've found they add up really quickly. In my experience high-res textures really can make an impact on your framerate.

Kind of rude to call it a lie. I dont think he is intentionally trying to mislead people. Hes observed one thing, youve observed another.

Well, I did say that if I got anything wrong feel free to correct me. That said, what size do you use mainly? I suppose I should put more emphasis on it really does depend on your computer, but I have to ask the second question of how old exactly is your computer or if not old, does it not have a video card or much ram?
Tons of my textures are sized 1024, a few are 2048, and of course lots are 512.
Just to be sure I was absolutly correct in my original assesment about textures not causing framerate drop, I started a game of MW GOTY with only the original files, no mods, no replacers, no nothing, and ran around both indoors a outdoors in Seyda Neen. I took note of my of my framerate and then saved and quit and then took all the textures I currently use and replaced the originals. I then started a new game, took note of my fps and loaded the game I had just saved and took note there as well; not that I expected much difference between the two. The grand effect here was a slight increase in cell loading time(on the order of a few seconds), and I am not sure the fps even dropped at all. It tends to fluxuate a little for me, but otherwise still maxed out at about ~61 even outside.(fluxuation both times was from ~55-60 with it mostly near 60 both tests. for whatever reason it gets capped there) So as you can see, I had absolutly no effect on fps from textures being replaced.
What exactly have you observed?

In my experience, you're wrong, at least in Morrowind, with a modern (ie, core or better) computer.

If I turn off all my esps but leave all the updated meshes and textures, my FPS is over 60. If I run a default GOTY install, its over 60.

you've probably got Vertical Sync on, which straps FPS to screen refresh rate, which would be 60Hz on most monitors (which means, 60FPS).

You can't see the difference between 60 and 65 with 20/20 vision, anyway, so it doesn't matter.

i had a crap load of 1024 textures, shrank them all down to 512 (now firetrucking clue how i did it).
my FPS was alot smoother. It could jst be my PC though?

Not all of us have decent computers, though. I run Morrowind (and Oblivion, somehow...) on http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2813.

That's a good point, but you also can't expect that modders who do a mod take care about frame rates on low end hardware, esspecially in case of Skyrim - Home of the Nords we don't take care about. If the mod is done in many years from now, only a very small number of people will still use such hardware.

Well if textures really can effect nondecent computers so badly, will someone please give us an example of what happens with no upgraded textures versus upgraded texures. And be sure to tell us your computer stats.



Thats interesting, what is your computer like?

Crap. psyringe's guide has been pruned by the forums. :violin: He did some extensive testing with mods. The general outcome is that GPU's from the last 5 or 6 years will have enough vRAM that texture size doesn't really make a significant impact.

Which brings me to what I originally thought. Its the amount of RAM your computer has that matters when it comes to textures, as the computer will only apply the texture to something once, not multiple times per second.

Assuming I am not completely off here, a texture should be thought of as like a static layer, it doesnt change any, the lighting conditions and what not applied over it do; I dont think lighting and those things are applied per pixel.
This actually makes some sense though:

With Oblivion you have all these types of maps that get taken into account when rendering things. With MW, you only have a few basic settings that get applied.

Feel free to tell me if I am wrong here. I am not an expert in computer graphics.

No, VRAM on your graphics card, not RAM in your computer. The card caches the textures it needs in its VRAM. If you turn round and look at something else, and the texture isn't already cached by the graphics card (or has been removed to make room for something else), it has to be sent to the graphics card by the CPU. Since we know that MW is CPU-bound due to not supporting multiple processors, this takes time in which it's not computing other game functions, but more importantly the new texture has to be retrieved from disk, which is the speed bottleneck. The bigger the texture, the more time it takes to transfer. Now you're fine until you look at something else not cached by the graphics card.

The extra time taken by bigger textures isn't really to do with the card rendering, that's massively parallel and easily accomplished by modern cards, it's getting textures into the card. That's dependent on your hard disk access time, primarily, so apart from having as much VRAM on your graphics card as possible to minimise texture reloads (you can get 2GB cards if your wallet is deep enough), upgrading your hard disk is likely to help most.

For maximum speed there, invest/upgrade to an SSD to run your games off, and ideally your OS too. Prices are dropping and capacities are increasing rapidly, while early reliability issues are now overcome - don't be fooled by misinformation about them wearing out due to "limited writes", as you'll never hit that in normal use. Intel/Corsair/Sandforce are the major players, and despite the headline benchmarks you can pretty much choose on price rather than performance. Personally I recommend (and I use/install many) the Intel SSDs for price and reliability, you'll never notice the slight performance difference day to day. Running a game (and OS) off SSD is an eyeopener if you've never tried it before. After adding more RAM to your computer (if anyone is still at 1GB or less), it's the single most cost-effective upgrade you can make. And they are silent, which doesn't exactly harm your gaming experience. :goodjob: