I've been doing some testing of my mod recently and as I run two monitors I have had task manager running in one so I can see what's happening with my CPU whilst playing -

I have am Intel laptop dualcore 2ghz running - and noticed a few things:

when I start MW the page file is about 450mb and after 10 minutes will have climbed to 700mb has anyone ever noted how big that gets to and therefore what the optimimum pagefile size should be for MW?

Seyda Neen is often very slow for me when starting a new character and I wondered if it was the chargen scripts - however I found that once leaving the Census office both cores rose to 100% and Seyda Neen was becoming a slideshow - once I travelled to Balmora the CPU usage dropped to around 55% - that's an average as one core seemed to be working harder than the other - I travelled back to Seyda Neen and the usage climbed back to 90%

As I was testing I only had one mod active in Seyda Neen and that was Wanderer's Dark Brotherhood ring - the one which allows you turn off the attacks (I hate testing characters and getting killed at level 1) - I didn't have the ring active so I don't think it's script was running in the background

Oh I am running the MCP as well so not sure if that is impacting in any way

Hmmm... I'm rambling... the point of the post is - I would like to know if FPS is tied directly to CPU usage - and if so what type of mods will increase CPU usage - is it scripts, textures, #of items in a cell or dialogue?

I've noticed that the FPS is lower in Seyda Neen then most other places and that is without mods. It could be because the npcs in Seyda Neen are closer together then in other places.

Sound will hit the CPU even harder than scripts. This is especially so in Seyda Neen, which has a lot of ambient sound.

Starting pagefile of 450MB is OK on Vista or Windows 7 but if it's Windows XP, it indicates that there's a lot of background crud running on your machine, and you may want to try clean-booting to get a cleaner environment to play the game in. Morrowind will chew up a bunch of pagefile space, but don't bother setting it to a non-default value; Windows isn't actually doing any physical pagefile I/O (unless you come close to running out of memory altogether).

MCP should have minimal/no impact as it corrects existing data rather than adding extra functions / processes - i believe.

FPS is affected by various factors , how much Ram you have , type and speed of processor/s you are using , operating system/ number and type of processes you have running in the background , graphics and or sound cards as these are designed to take some of the workload off the cpu so speed/quality and onboard Ram (if applicable) of these cards are also a factor. Hard drive speed and speed of your cd drive may also play a part. and of course the type of mods you are using.

Information loaded into RAM when you enter a cell can be crudely categorised into static and variable data, static data doesn't change once it is loaded so shouldn't impact your fps at all so things like models and textures affect your load times as you move between cells. Variable data is potentially the big fps killer as your hardware has to handle lots of calculations/processes on an ongoing basis eg animations in particular are especially cpu intensive so having lots of NPC's and Beasties in a cell coukld potentially kill fps depending on your hardware and the number of animations/processes updating on an ongoing basis . This is assuming you have sufficient Ram to begin with , which i would suggest a minimum of 1 GB but 2GB or more woukld be better for handling a lot of the new stuff being made for Morrowind much of which is on par with if not better than stuff in the newest video games.

The rain/snow collision feature of MCP might have some kind of impact on performance, but other than that it shouldn't.

This is strange. I get great FPS in seyda neen, but balmora kills me. So idk.

Same here. In fact, Seyda Neen is probably one of the few settlements that doesn't lag as badly when using mods like SF Npc's additions and such.

Most towns kill the FPS for me as well, but I guess that's obvious. Disabling MGE's distant land helps at getting +30 fps in towns, but I only do that when I want to move through the city quickly.

If your computer is writing to pagefile because of the game, it would suggest you do not have enough ram/vram to handle your current setup.

Morrowind does not make use of multiple cores, which suggests a performance problem other than running the game itself. Check what's running in the background.

Heavily scripted mods, especially those that add npc's/creatures tend to affect fps more than most other types of mods. Texture replacers were once a major concern when Morrowind originally came out. At the time, videocards typically had 128 MB of ram and the computer would end up swapping back and forth from the disk, drastically diminishing performance. Nowadays, graphics cards come with much more memory (512 mb, 1024 mb?!?) so it normally isn't much of a concern. However, if you're playing the game on a laptop with an integrated graphics chip with little memory, it could be the source of some of your problems (it might explain the pagefile growing in size as you play). It might also be problematic to run with MGE. Of course, all this depends on specs you did not provide.

See these threads for more info:
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1062891
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=877881
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1032460
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=877435

Windows isn't actually writing to pagefile. That number is just a reservation and does not indicate that any I/O is occurring. But a pagefile reservation that's too high (450MB with Morrowind not running) indicates that there's a lot of crud being run.

When Windows actually has to write the pagefile (which it only does when it's so out of memory that it has to page out pages that have been written to), performance of everything on the computer goes to hell in a handcart.

The pagefile starts at 450 mb, increases in size to 700mb as he/she plays Morrowind, and the performance of the person's game IS going to hell in a handcart. That doesn't indicate the pagefile is being written to? I don't know that I'm right but it seemed one of several things worth considering...no?

i know collision has a huge part in framerates. you can find out if that's the issue if you toggle tcl and your framerates skyrocket though.

The only way you can tell that the pagefile is being written to is to run Performance Monitor and check Pages Output/sec and Page Writes/sec. Windows only writes to the pagefile as a last resort, never in normal operation. Task Manager lies to you. I bet if the OP did this, they would be zero.

There are many other explanations of poor performance, including overloaded sound (especially on a laptop), scripting, and AI. Page thrashing is actually about the last thing to consider.

It is good the see that someone actually understands how the pagefile works and understands that those numbers really don't mean anything. I get so tired of seeing people tell others their page file numbers are too high just from looking at a dxdiag.

The servers I administer at work show as having 9+ GB pagefiles, however, they never get touched. As Dogsbody has said, the only way to tell that your page file is in use is to run an application like Performance Monitor (perfmon) and monitor the actual read and writes to the pagefile. People that don't administer servers for a living just don't understand those pagefile numbers.

For reference, my dedicated gaming machine has a separate partition for each game and each game gets its own clean OS (XP SP3), motherboard drivers, video drivers, 7-zip, SB drivers, and .NET 3.5 show 235MB pagefile after booting into the OS (4GB).

Thanks for all the replies



Well that makes sense as my onboard sound system is as useful as a damp tissue - I take it for ambient you mean creature sounds? I didn't have the BC sounds mod running so apart from the normal music I wasn't paying attention to hearing anything else. I just noticed that when I went into the middle of Seyda Neen my CPU usage kept climbing.



That is good information - so that's why Korana's Tavern always was so slow - due to the high number of animations running at one time - I take it that shouldn't include idle animations as they are just built into the NPC's main animation file - I have an interior cell with 12 NPC's in and have no lag



Thanks for the threads - some of those brought make memories - however my enquiry I thought was a little different

I had read that MW did not use multiple cores - however when I'm watching the taskmanager - shouldn't one core then be showing as doing all the work and the other just running background processes? Sometimes it looked like they were almost in sync - well when both cores hit 100% of course they were - that's why i posted this in the first place to try and understand what MW is doing to excite CPU activity. Next time I run MW I'll check to see if any background processes start increasing.

Would setting Morrowind's affinity in the task manager to only 1 core help at all regarding performance? Or is this done automatically?

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing.
Why the HELL does morrowind keep going over 60 fps when it's the limit I set in the .ini file? It's like the game just outright goes against his own instructions or something.
This happens in interior cells when distant land is disabled mind you, but still, it shouldn't even happen. It should be capped just like the FPS limit in every other game.

It'll spread across all the cores available, though I think it's only actually using one at any instant. No, there's no automatic affinity mapping.

On NUMA CPUs like the Phenom II's and Core i7's, this may help a bit. It may also help on unstable rigs or on older AMD CPUs that have trouble with coming out of Cool'n'Quiet rapidly. On shared-cache, shared-memory CPUs like Core 2 Duos and Quads, I don't think it'll make any difference.

I have a phenom X3 and If you think it'd help in any way, I'd like to try it. The problem is though, that I can't set the affinity manually when I start the process because alt-tabbing out of morrowind either kills my graphics when I go back to it or just outright crashes the game. Would there be a way to set my PC configuration so it automatically changes the affinity automatically when the process starts?

And what I just said about the FPS limit... well, it's just weird. I tried using the MGE FPS counter instead of Fraps and it does stay at 60, even though it doesn't feel like it is.

Try http://www.mlin.net/SMPSeesaw.shtml

I noticed the same on my old computer.
On my new one it's working like a charm without any issues what so ever.
At first I was afraid to get the old "to fast for the game so now it laggs like hell instead" phenomena but, no no.

Thanks, I'll try that.

EDIT: I may be missing something, but this doesn't really solve my problem. The thing is I can't set the affinity of the process because doing it in the task manager forces me to alt-tab from the game, making it crash. The same things happens with this program since I am supposed to change from Morrowind to it, which will also make the game crash.

I need something that automatically sets the affinity of the Morrowind.exe process once it starts, or something like that.

EDIT 2: Never mind, I found an application that does this. It's called THG Task Assignment Manager and it gets the job done. You can find it http://www.xdowns.com/soft/download.asp?softid=19069

I personally found that setting Morrowind's affinity to a certain core made no difference at all, except it actually made that core max out at 100% rather than stay balanced.

To change processor affinity before the program is started, use Microsoft's imagecfg.exe through a command prompt to permanently modify Morrowind.exe. Make a backup before doing this. The changes will probably be overwritten if your .exe is overwritten. They might remain if the file is just modified. I am not sure.

You can download it here if you don't have it:

http://www.robpol86.com/index.php/ImageCFG

I like to take a copy of the exe I want to modify and imagecfg.exe and put them in my root drive or one folder deep so I don't have to wade through a bunch of folders and I hear the program gets confused with file paths that contain spaces.

So for example if you put Morrowind.exe in C:\

1. Type cmd in the search or run box
2. Navigate to the directory where imagecfg.exe is located cd\ or just C: if you put it there.
3. Type: imagecfg -a 0xn C:\Morrowind.exe (Where n is == the Core that you want in the list below) and (the directory where Morrowind.exe is located.

1 = CPU0
2 = CPU1
4 = CPU2
8 = CPU3

Ie.

imagecfg -a 0x0 C:\Morrowind.exe

-Would make Morrowind.exe use CPU0.

Then just cut and paste it back into your Morrowind folder. Make sure your backup is somewhere else safe.

Thanks, but I did try with the program I mentioned before and suprisingly enough, it actually made the game's performance worse.