I don't have Morrowind installed on my laptop and I'm too impatient to wait until I get home to try this myself. Over the past couple of weeks I've taken every single misc item model from vanilla Morrowind and created higher poly replicas. I'm not talking about some absurdly high poly models, maybe 175% of the original model. I haven't really changed any textures, I've just changed the models and added more detail.

Now I haven't tried importing them into Morrowind... but theoretically, how much of an fps impact are we talking about if the do the same with every single model in the game? That means every cell, indoors or outdoors, will have the original poly count * 1.75. (So if the original cell had 5 thousand polys, it'll have 8750 polys with my models. ish)

Do you think the game will be unplayable? Do you think it'll run smoothly on a modern gaming system?

I have a lot of free time between classes this year so I figured I'd do something with all that free time. And I decided to mod Morrowind but I don't want to go through the trouble of re-creating every model if it'll make the game unplayable. :/

There should be no problem at all. Please remember Morrowind was designed to work on yesteryears computers not todays beasts!

In my mod I have a cell with 1.700+ objects and 1.3 million faces in poly count, and it runs with MGE XE and 90 cells view distance.

An 1.75 multiplier should be no problem at all.
Before you start to build models, look around for already existing replacers. Rocks, trees and many misc items have already been converted in high-poly models. But I'm sure there's plenty of objects that still need the same treatment.

Yeah take a peak and see what needs to be replaced. Like Taddeus says, there's probably a lot of things still around to improve

Thanks for the quick replies

Ah, yes I realize there are plenty of replacers available but I've always had a soft spot for vanilla Morrowind and so I decided to create a replacer that changes as little as possible. The textures are pretty much the same but the models are more detailed. It's difficult to explain so I'll post some screens when I get home later today.

This is a personal project anyway and it's not intended for public release.

Now I'm curious to see those screenshots

More high poly reworkings of vanilla resources is always welcome news to me :3