I have been playing Morrowind with MGSO \ MGE at maximum settings for a while now, at low but stable framerates (never more than 40 fps outdoors, 20 fps at worst) and accepted it as just a result of modern effects being added to an old engine. When I decided to lower some MGE settings for a few extra frames just now, however, it barely made any difference.

Going from 26 cells draw distance with HQ fog to 13 cells without HQ fog: +3 fps.

Disabling Outdoor SSAO: +2 fps.

Disabling all shaders: +5 fps.

Disabling grass: no framerate profit.

Disabling environment shadows: no framerate profit.

Disabling shaders, grass, distant lands, environment shadows, basically everything MGE adds to Morrowind: framerate between 40 fps - 50 fps at best.

Vanilla Morrowind without MGSO \ MGE installed: constant 60 fps with Vsync.

TL;DR: something is holding back my framerate in MGSO 3.0 and lowering settings (even the particularly taxing ones like distant lands and SSAO) isn't worth it with how little performance gain it gives. Does anyone have an idea what could be holding my machine back?

ATi HD 6950 2GB

Intel 2500k 3,3 Ghz

8 GB DDR3 RAM 1,333 Ghz

Windows 7 Home Premium