High resolution and shaders---> performance hit. :For shaders,(mostly) it doesn't matter how much geometry is in scene, number of pixels defines performance. So, high resolution is a curse and blessing at the same time. Recommendation is SLI-Crossfire solutions.

I want to keep it simple but I added some of your suggestions. Obviously in a benchmark, people shouldn't be using fps optimizers.(or that shouldn't matter at all)

My AI is set at 50%, view distance 33%. And max FPS is working you say. It doesn't work here. Set it to 60, getting 117 FPS in main menu.

@Vurt,
some insane clocks you got there. You can optimize distant land to get some more FPS. I think landscape requires a lot of power. More than it should, also it really doesn't matter how high quality texture you choose, it always turns up crap. It is OK though, under all grass and mods +distance, they are not that bad. Statics can be reduced too ~10 FPS hit, and shaders are customizable. I wonder what Crysis guys do for 5000 lines of shader code to work in real time.

I was playin around with some settings earlier, and here are my findings

I turned the world texture resolution down to 512, and the normalmap res down to 512 also. This gave me an avg 10FPS extra, and not noticeably any worse looking. This was using all the same settings as i was previously.
I then tried it with the texture sizes as above, and also decreased the world mesh detail down to "Medium" from "Ultra High" and this gave me another 5 (roughly) FPS. And im now getting an average frame rate of 40-60FPS.
Turned off all the shaders and my FPS shot upto 100avg fps. This is still with distant land at 10, distant statics at 25, 200, 400, and all reflections turned on.

So, im quite happy you made this topic vtastek.:celebration:

I can now comfortably play with all my shaders on, (only 4) and distant statics still quite high. The game looks great and plays above 30fps, which is all you need really, unless you spend all your time strafing whilst looking into the distance :whistling:

I'm well aware of that, as I mentioned that I disabled the distant land option, however as I also mentioned it was still crashing likely because disabling of distant land also removed rendering effects which conflicted with some of my installed mods, e.g. ownership detection which uses an MGE effect to change the crosshair color to red on NPC owned/tagged items.

Anyways, what MGE setting do you use to get such high framerates? IIRC I just left mine mostly on default but high res textures well, here's what's in my .ini:

[Distant Land]Distant Land=OnDistant Statics=OnDisable In Interiors=FalseDistant Land Initially Disabled=FalseMW Blending Initially Disabled=FalseDraw Distance=13Auto Distances=TrueDistant Blur Strength=0Near Statics End=3Far Statics End=6Very Far Statics End=12Far Static Min Size=600Very Far Static Min Size=800Water Reflects Land=TrueWater Reflects Near Statics=TrueWater Reflects Far Statics=TrueAbove Water Fog Start=2Above Water Fog End=13Below Water Fog Start=0Below Water Fog End=3Interior Fog Start=0Interior Fog End=0.9Enable Sky Reflections=False[DLWizard Settings]Plugins view sort order=TypeWorld texture resolution=4096World normalmap resolution=2048Create world texture in two steps=FalseWorld mesh detail=HighMinimum static size=400Grass density=100Mesh detail=FullSkip mipmap levels=1Include activators=TrueInclude misc objects=TrueUse old simplification algorithm=FalseUse static overrides=TrueStatics for behave like exterior cells=OnStatics for interiors with water=On

AA is set to 2x and AF to 4x (changing these seems to have almost zero effect on my FPS, but this is where I left them after messing around the last time...

[EDIT]
...and this chain of shaders:
HDR lighting
knx_SSAO_v09
Bloom
ImproveWaterCaustics06a
[/EDIT]

You're right it is causing problems, but it shouldn't. Distant land shouldn't affect gameplay and mods for MGE.(exception being mods that have shaders using depthbuffer, but I doubt any mod have one). So it is a bug in MGE, hopefully will be fixed soon. I will report it one more time, devs are around this time of season.

Now, your performance is really bad. You have a 2.4 Mhz chip, almost all users ranging 2.8-3.0 reported their FPS around 60-80, -+10. You've reported your FPS without MGE as 30. Now, you should make tweaks because MGE can take 30-60 FPS easily...

So start with Morrowind tweaks. You may need to remove the indicator mod temporarily. I have posted some ini tweaks and MGE tweaks. Also check your mods for conflicts in mlox. Defrag your HDD and close background applications. Standard stuff. If Morrowind isn't totally ignoring below 2.4 cpu power, you should gain some speed there. I think with right tweaks you can see 60 fps.

Distant land settings seems nice, min size 400 must help a lot. But possibly, you're seeing a lot of pop-ups. You can cancel misc objects though, as they are mostly too small to have a distant land lod, off course unless there is a specific reason. Now only your draw distance seems to be a problem. As I think 7(-+2) is enough.

Now, your GPU is powerful, you should use phal's new fog. I have posted some DL settings a while back for the new fog. Here:

Draw distance 9Above Water fog start 1,6Above Water fog end 3,0Near 150Near end dist 2,0Far 300Far end dist 3,1Very Far 500Very Far end dist 5,0

You can give it a try. Don't forget to enable new fog in phal's ingame.fx shader.(You can lower above water fog start to 0 to replace Morrowind's fog as phal recommends.)

I hope I can be useful.

Sli/Crossfire solutions? That would be a bad idea. It won't do a single thing at all, as Morrowind would have to be made to work with SLi or Crossfire so really you would be wasting money trying to get SLi or Crossfire just for Morrowind.
Plus the fact that the CPU is used for the most part anyways.

I think what he was saying is that maybe MGE with lots of shaders loaded would benefit from sli/cruddfire.

But to be honest, in my opinion, performance boots when using Sli/Cruddfire are quite minimal. And again in my opinion not worth paying double for roughly 10% gain in very few games

Tried several tweak sites and, basically, my mw.ini file is almost the same as yours excepting that thread priority is 1 and thread loading is enabled.

also did:

Interior Cell Buffer=64Exterior Cell Buffer=128

I'll try looking at the new fog, but I might just lower a few MGE wizard setting to see if it help at all.

I still have a hard time believing that my vanilla mw is stuck at 30FPS, it's almost like it's being forced to run at VSYNC/2 (60Hz LCD / 2 -> 30FPS)

I'm also using latest MW code patch + unofficial patch + the two released Tamriel rebuilt maps (did MCP mainly for some of the collision fixes and map size for Tamriel Rebuilt)

[EDIT]
svn rev 120 is now available... rebuilding distant land w/it ATM...
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
reading through the last MGE thread I see that other people using 119 and ATI cards and cat 10.3 were getting locked to 30FPS w/distant land OFF

Turning off distant land in 120 does ABSOLUTELY nothing, distant land was still enabled

no notable perf changes either...
[/EDIT2]

It would be a good idea to continue to use rev 118. I think it is the most stable of new revisions. Configuring distant land is very tricky. Those settings, I posted, minimize the pop-ups and fill the view distance without adding too much to very far distance.

@lettuceman,
I did mean crossfire/sli for reducing the performance hit from shaders. That can be high from using 6+ shaders. Also, that theory obviously needs testing. A good place could be a small room interior where other factors are reduced. Also, I think something can be done there for optimizations. Something called Uber-Shaders.

Thats my rig, the one I have in my sig...which I realize now that I haven't fixed since I downed it to 3.5 ghz due a bsod during a 24 hour pi95 stress test.....oops, anyways, I won't bash mge's performance too much, while it is troubling how many resources it eats up, I have nearly 600 mods painstakenly combined into one massive 86,076 kb esp, including large landmass mods like TR 1+2, Whitewolf of loken, Ald Vendras....and many more, taking up nearly all of the map that is provided through the MCP.

That being said, I know that when I regenerate statics for just morrowind and the two official expansions I gain nearly 10 fps across the board, so the poor performance is as much my fault as mge's.

My statics generation file is a hair over 250 mb, and if I lower statics to 50 it climbs to over 300, so yea, it definately adds up to a performance hit, but the game remains perfectly playable with a bare minimum of 14 fps in Piratelords/Psyron Wards redesigned and expanded vivic(starfires and mca npc's sprawled throughout) collaboration and a max in the wilderness nearing 45 fps.

I used to think anything sub 30 and I'll stop adding mods, but I found the game doesn't become unplayable untill you hit about 10 fps, so it works for now, and it looks darn good in the process!

Of course, next year, when I get a new AMD bulldozer core and get it oc'd and tweaked to stability, I'll do a comparison! haha

But the shaders aren't automatically offloaded to a second GPU, they have to be programmed to look for a second GPU.

Been a while since I last posted, but I'm lookin into attempting to shove Morrowind and MGE down my ATI videocard's throat whether it likes it or not. I'll be d**ned if I can run a heavily modded QTP3 Oblivion and not MGE...

Specs: Laptop
CPU - Intel Core2 Duo P8400, 2.27 ghz
Ram - 4 gigs
Video Card/ GPU - ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470, 256 MB (2 gigs dedicated ram)
All Drivers are up to date.
OS - Vista 64/32 hybrid. Don't ask... Toshiba and Microsoft teamed up to do somthing they shouldn't have.

I haven't touched Morrowind in a while, but I dug around and found some records.
Unmodded morrowind gave me roughly 30ish average fps maxing at 60 and droppin to 20 sometimes -.-
MGE was incompatable with my video card, My Fps rarely got above 1.3472 -.- (I'm hoping that they can get along and be good pal's again)

I plan to try it all again and see if I can get my game to look like that video Vality7 had up for a while. The New morrowind effects- Balmora video. Perhaps the most amazing thing I have ever seen. It is now unfortunatly set for private veiwers only, and his website is shut down.

Anyways Hope this can help you out somewhat.

Now, that's a lot! Here, a similar rig to yours:
THE NEW KING:

AMD Phenom™ II X2 550(Unfortunately, I'm not sure about the clock speeds, the user only had one value there: 4 (4000?), I'm skeptical :glare: )

Min - 120
Max - 300
Avg - 250

The difference, user's game is "moderately" modded. So we can say mods can have a good impact. That max 300 value is unbelievable. And that min 120 is the thing I needed to see. Now minus 60(for MGE) and we get 60 FPS. Add motion blur and shadows ~30 FPS.


I write shaders. I never seen a shader with SLI relevant codes. It is exactly automatically offloaded to second and more GPUs by driver. Programmers can help the process by reducing share data and avoid limiting buffers at application level, which is common practice in the first place. The driver settings can be set by application or user via control panel. But it still needs testing.


Thanks, CPU is very important as you see. Beginning around 30 FPS is not good for MGE effects. There must be some room for MGE to operate. All MGE related features can be tweaked to have 15-30(distant land), 5-20(statics), 10-30(shaders) performance hits. And check MGE screenshots thread to see what more achieved since those vidoes.

eh I have, =/ I haven't seen anything that looked as good as what he was pulling off. It's bizzarre though because I can max out my video card's settings and have QTP3 + 100 or so mods on Oblivion and it runs at between 25-45 fps. 60's in buildings and 25 was as low as I've seen it and that was only because FCOM spawned like 20 goblins 5 antronaches and like 10 daedroth and they were warring with bandits who were also fighting guards. Got real messy when the mage guild got involved. Anyway, I'm just happy I could help man.

Thats not completely accurate, the problem is that most performance hits are more like a % hit rather than a specific number hit, what I mean is, the higher your base fps, the bigger an impact each of those things added will have....for instance, if I start with a base fps of 100 and add distant land and it cuts my fps to 75, then on a rig with a base fps of 60 will only drop to about 45 from adding distant land, the % performance drop is roughly equal, but the actual number of fps dropped will be smaller if your base score is lower, making the difference between a high end system and a low end system smaller the more things you add.

For instance I get ~30 fps on average with distant land, statics and shaders on, but my friend who runs an athlon 7750 not oc'd and a 512 mb 9800 gt gets ~24 fps on average with everything else being equal(mods, d/l settings, resolution ect.), but my computer is easily >20% better than his despite the appearance only a 20% improvement on performance by raw numbers, however, if you look at min fps for him and me, you get a better view of the difference in the machines, I drop to about 14 fps in Piratelord's redesigned vivic, but in the same spot, he is lucky to get 10 fps, which is walking the line of unplayable and shows a greater difference in performance.

A well built pc, using an OC'd I5 or I7(4-4.2 ghz on air is possible and they should already perform nearly 15% better than a phenom2 clock for clock...side note, I5>I7 cost/performance ratio, since Hyperthreading is not needed for...much of anything for normal users) with a good high end gfx card like the new 4xx series from Nvidia or the 58xx series from ATI would blow away mine or any other AMD users numbers, untill you start adding in all of the bells and whistles from MGE, than the law of %'s will kick in and it won't appear to be as big a difference, but the difference will still be there. Which is why Vurt has the best numbers on this survey! Regardless, I look forward to AMD's quad core Bulldozer chips next year, I hear they are going to blow Nehalem out of the water and be even more efficient clock for clock....time will tell.(I hope so, I like rooting for the underdogs) :celebration:

I made up the numbers, if you don't hit a bottleneck they might be similar. Distant land is consistent, but shaders need a little more care for final speed and optimizations.

Hall of fame for Morrowind performance:
AMD Phenom™ II X2 550(User unknown)
Min - 120
Max - 300
Avg - 250

AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE(matilija)
Min - 100
Max - 240
Avg - 140

Intel C2D E8400 @ 4.13GHz(Vurt)
Min: 77
Max: 277
Average: 80

It's still very difficult to draw any conclusions from these tests since there are still a few factors that are unknown.. one of the most important would be how the morrowind draw distance is set in-game. Mine was on max while i did my tests. On min i get these results:

max 326
average 170
min 155

as you can see the difference is immense depending on how it's been set.. i would guess many people have it on the lowest if they use MGE? Personally use the highest setting for screenshots and lowest when i play to get much better FPS..

I play at 33-40%. By the way those 3 are the only ones that can pass 100 FPS(or even 85, for MAX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

vtastek, are you sure about that? Because games now Sli or crossfire optimized have no performance improvement whatsoever. It is basically running like one card.
I could be wrong though so please don't take my question the wrong way.

I never had a sli-crossfire setup. So can't tell you for sure. But it is set in driver level, with optimizations in application level according to nvidia performance papers. But I'm certain, you don't add sli relevant codes in a shader.

I should have said optimized for dual gpu's.

SLI/crapfire is GPU driver dependent ONLY. It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with how a shader/game is programmed.

I know that ATI does it by alternating frame rendering between the cards from some recent driver discussion on Phoronix. No idea how nVidia actually implements it, but I suspect that they do it in a more intelligent fashion given that their drivers aren't almost worthless.

Desktop: plan to build an LGA-1366 based core-i7 myself as game performance is about the same, but I do more than gaming and appreciate the kickass Intel CPU arch. (Old desktop was an X2 4800+ from back when AMD was actually useful, but maybe a miracle will happen and they'll actually spend $$$ on R&D and come up with a worthwhile new arch rather than just trying to cram more cores into a die.) Likely a GF100 based GPU as I've had it with AMD and their "drivers".

[EDIT]
Well, lets add in mods too then, I've got
MCA 5.2 running + names
TR1 & 2 maps
Clean Bottle Home Enhanced (still a bit buggy)
all the "official" mods
A Grand Abode (large house in Balmora)
Indy Bank
Ownership Indicator
Madd Leveler

Bunch of mods that were supposed to "fix" MGE problems from 2008: (Should probably check to see if I really need these any longer...)
Distant Land Fix for MGE (harlanrm, Supernatural, Yacoby)
bunch of Pov_Distant_Activator_Fix_PQR (where PQR=Vivec, Incarnate, Holamayan, etc.)
[/EDIT]

O.o I didn't even think to check that, mine was on max too.............

New results with min morrowind view distance.

Max 312
average 188
min 169

I'm finding it wierd that my fps seems more stable than yours Vurt, you have greater max, but my min and average seem to be higher.........oh well, regardless, I need water cooling so I can get 4ghz +

With rev124, using the Disable MGE in game option in first tab, I get:
245 max
45 min

Probably c. 80 avg.

Just unchecking use distant land in the dist land tab, I get c. 12 FPS, but distant land is actually disabled this time.

MGE seems to initialize almost immediately when loading an outdoor save or going outside for the first time...

[EDIT]
rev126 is out now, but it seems to have broken MGE dependent scripts..

also didn't really notice any perf increase, but was supposed to have fixed a few shader problems introduced with 124...
[/EDIT]

Around 12-15 FPS with 241 mods and 5 MGE shaders(ssao, dof, improved water, sunshaft and true bloom) and distant land.

Around 20 FPS without shaders.

Around 20 FPS without any mods (but shaders)

Less than 30 FPS with zero mod and zero shader.

My processor is athlon dual core at 2,8Ghz and my graphic card is nvidia GTX 260 (win xp and 4Gb ram) !!

:(

I loaded a good deal of recommended graphics mods on my first install of MW and with distant lands enable it absolutely chugs. Even with a Phenom II X4 955 (lightly OC'd to X4 965 levels) and a factory OC'd GTX 260 I get about 28-40 FPS around Pelagiad (1680x1050). Quite a shock. When I turn off distant lands it jumps up to 45-60 FPS (vertical sync on). I may back up my saved games and be a little more judicious about mod installation. Try MGE first, see how it goes, and then add other graphics mods.