wow, at first I figured you had so many items that fps dropped. But the pics don't seem to have too many items. Are the items you use HIGH poly counts? that could also be a cause, too many polygons on the screen... It seems strange that you get fps hits for what you have...
Some of the Dwemer items, like the Coherers, pitchers, and especially the bowls are pretty high in the polygon area, yeah. But I don't think they're at the threshold for impacting FPS, not this much.
Simple solution... Split your cell into smaller cells. Even splitting it into two different cells will make a huge difference.
You mean like create a new cell and transport half of Ahkmchambir into it, then link the two halves with a teleporting door? Hmm... kind of takes away from the feel of the place...
You know now I'm really contemplating just calling this a learning experience and starting over with a different layout, utilizing multiple cells this time. It would allow me to make a lot of corrections that I'd previously given up on, as well as develop a more solid plan, and possibly cram even more stuff into the ruin that I originally had in mind!
Yeah. I think I'm going to do that. Tomorrow.
After X-Men: First Class. Fassbender rules.
EDIT:
I assume the problem is caused by the engine rendering things that the player can't see which is not entirely ludicrous because I don't think it was intended to be able to tell what meshes are and aren't transparent.
Looking up or down often puts most objects out of your POV. As long as something's in your POV, even if there's a wall between your character and that something, the game will render it and this kills the game provided you are facing a high-enough number of populated rooms.
That certainly applies to my hallway, as well as explains why Ebonheart is THE biggest FPS killer for me, at least as far as something vanilla goes. There's modded armor out there that does even worse, but I don't have any of it.
Sometimes I feel like I should just bite the bullet and play Oblivion. Morrowind's limitations are starting to bug me.