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) !!
:(
That is pretty bad, did you tried lowering view distance slider. Mine is set at %33. And I can get 60-70 FPS without MGE(with mods), and I have a 2.8 CPU too. Windows 7 greatly reduces stuttering. Super fetch is working great for Morrowind.
It is pretty clear that GPU has almost no contribution to Morrowind FPS. And unless you have gone past 3.2 Mhz, Morrowind performance suffers around 60 FPS. But miraculously, getting past 3.2 Mhz, like 3.5+, and instant boost that lets you see 100+ FPS and even max 240-300 FPSs.
My whole point is Morrowind's initial performance is too bad to add MGE goodies.
There is a mod for Oblivion that increases FPS by tweaking "hash tables"(don't know what it is exactly, something about memory)
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23208
claiming Oblivion's memory management is pretty bad. I can say there is something wrong with Morrowind too there. I made a test earlier, which brings down any computers performance in Morrowind around 5 FPS and less.
Example: this CPU is slow compared to others here but check the FPS:
400 MAX
150-220 AVG
2.4 core2 quad
It is not a q6600 but a Q8200.
A quote I found regarding them:
Smaller physical cache size for Q8200. Lower latencies for Q8200.
The biggest advantages the Q8200 (vs the Q6600) has is the lower power consumption and the addition of SSE4 instructions.
So I don't know what can be found from this info. SSE4 instructions don't think so. Maybe new architectures are really that good. :shrug:
I am think there is an artificial cache limit for between CPU-GPU for rendering, and it is very low like 3-4 MBs. And when lot's of things tries to go in there, that creates a great bottleneck. Those fast CPUs are fast but not that fast, I can see that they have high cache levels though, the above example kills my theory. :shrug:
And again for Oblivion, there are distant land mods. Mods that altering meshes for distant land usage
"Really almost everything visible"
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20053
That kind of mod might improve distant land's look and also provide better performance.
I would want an "all landmarks visible" distant land mod myself. This at the very best can make distant land tweaking a lot easier.
Morrowind performance is a maze.