» Mon May 02, 2011 3:46 am
Video card is the big issue.
CPU: Morrowind wasn't written to utilize multiple processors, so don't worry about having lots of cores(*). The performance of the individual cores is what matters, not how many you have. That said, I'm not sure if the choice between modern CPU's really matters even with MGE. It's possible even a low end Celeron or Sempron might work just as well as anything else. Don't take my word on that though, I haven't experimented with MGE on different CPU types.
* = There is a minor benefit to having a dual-core, because then you can benefit from the "thread loading" setting in Morrowind.ini. This causes the game to load map data in a separate thread as you walk. I find it still pauses the game but not quite as long as the default setting.
Memory: 2GB DDR2 is fine. I've been playing with distant land recently on a 2GB machine, it's been smooth and no problems so far. I do believe that Morrowind leaks memory (allocates temporary RAM and forgets to free it), so as it runs it can eventually run itself out of RAM and crash. The reason I believe this is because on an older computer I noticed the more available RAM I had, the less often Morrowind would crash. But with 2GB I think this is a non-issue.
Hard drive: no problem, only difference this might make is how long it takes to load areas of the map. I wouldn't worry about it.
Video card: This is the big one, definitely matters. Higher graphical details and screen resolution mainly impacts the video card.
On my current computer, I started with an inexpensive ATI HD4350 based card, MGE distant land was slow and I didn't use it. Recently I upgraded to an nVidia GTX260 based card, now distant land runs 60fps most of the time, dropping toward 30fps sometimes (which is still smooth in a slow game like Morrowind). This is at 1280x1024 using MGE distant land, but I'm still on default textures (haven't looked into texture packs yet). I also haven't finished tweaking the MGE settings.
I haven't tried very many cards with distant land so I can't really say what the "minimum" acceptable card would be. I think a lot depends on how aggressive you want to set the details in the MGE setup.
Heavily modded Morrowind is an unusual application, It's too bad that nobody does benchmarks for this but it's not surprising they don't. I'm not sure how applicable the mainstream, modern game benchmarks are.
I would theorize that the fastest cards for graphically modded Morrowind would probably be those with fast memory and texturing performance. I don't think the geometry computations would be as much a problem as all the extra texturing, especially with high detail texture packs.
That's just my theory, so I went with a card that emphasizes fast video memory. I could be wrong, I've never been in a position to compare comparable cards in heavily modded Morrowind, but it would be interesting.
I'd start by just setting up MGE, try to generate distant land, and see how it goes. Then you'll know how much improvement you need (if any) from what you're running now.
