Was hoping someone could help me resolve a problem.

I'm currently running a playthrough with a number of mods but I've been seeing my fps drop to less than 15 fps resulting in all kinds of stuttering. After some trial and error I've managed to narrow the problem down to Vality7's Bitter Coast and Ascadian Islands mods. These are the two mods of his that add lots of trees. When these two mods are not installed, morrowind runs at 60+ fps, but the second I enable these mods everything starts stuttering and gets really laggy.

My solution to this has been to use the morrowind fps optimizer to reduce the view distance so that my fps stays stable around 30 fps. This works as a rough fix but I'd really like to enjoy Vality's beautiful mods at full settings (i.e. full draw distance).

Additionally, I'm pretty sure my computer should be able to handle this just fine. I'm running 6gb of ram, an Nvidia gtx 285, and a core i7 processor which makes me think that I should be able to run a 9 year old game (albeit heavily modded) at full settings without fps problems. Does anyone know what might be causing the Vality mods to have such a dramatic negative effect on my fps?

Thanks

I wouldn't have thought valities mods would have that sort of impact on fps , they don't affect my pc like that so i would be looking for other factors , like using ultra high resolution replacement textures for the trees, using MGE on maximum settings etc.

Lots of statics and such for Morrowind to render slows things down :shrug: .

What frequency is your CPU running at? It might be an old game, but with mods, the performance margins afforded by its age can be easily diminished.

CPU is a 2.67 GHz Quad Core.

Are you using MGE ?

Nope. Framerate was so bad with Vality's stuff installed, I figured MGE would only aggravate the issue.

Have you altered your game settings , most notably view distance and AI distances, AI probably isn't the cause in this case but the view distance could be if you have moved the slider to 'Far' ? IF so move it back a bit.

I know this sounds silly, but try disabling one of the added trees in the console and checking to see if there's another tree underneath it. I helped another player who was getting a huge FPS hit in Seyda Neen and he narrowed it down to two trees. When he disabled one, he found about a dozen more underneath. It could be this is a case of doubling, if you've added the mods, removed them, and added them again.

Elaura that sounds promising. I have been having the problems around Seyda Neen and Pelagiad. How does one disable trees from the console?

I love Vality′s trees too, but the hit on slower and older cpu is really noticable, Id say that the 3 mods that hit the fps most in morrowind would be Children of Morrowind, Morrowind comes alive and Vality′s trees. I use MGE but only have 2 shader enabled, with them on I get 15% hit so its not that bad.

It makes sense really. Add more stuff to render and it'll take a toll on performance. Thing is, my cpu should be up to the task. It's only about a year old and it was top of the line when purchased. Also I don't see any fps hit with Morrowind Comes Alive, which further suggests something weird is going on between Vality's trees and my computer...

To disable a static ingame, you need to be playing the English version of MW and have an English keyboard (in order to open the console).

If you have those, first position your character so you are looking at a tree you know has been added by the mod.
Open the console by pressing the 'tilde' key. That's this one: ~ usually found in the upper left of your keyboard, under the esc key and to the left of the number 1.
Now you want to left click your mouse on the tree in question so that the tree ID is in the title bar of the console window.
Type the word 'disable' in the console window (without the quotes) and press the 'enter' key.
If the tree is only a single tree, there should be empty space after you press 'enter'. If there's still a tree there, then there is doubling.

If you find there is doubling, rather than deleting all the trees, I would make a clean save and then check the mods one by one to see if any one in particular is causing the problem.

To make a clean save:

save in an unmodded interior cell
exit
uncheck all the tree mods
Open the game and save in a new slot (with a new name)
exit
check one of the mods again, start the game and see if you still have the FPS problem in that area.

Thanks for the info. Gonna try this and report back...

Nope. No doubling problems. Thanks for the tip though.

Sorry that didn't help. I do know that Morrowind was not written to support multi-core CPUs. It only runs on one core, so if your new CPU is Quad-core, you aren't using its full potential with Morrowind. Also, GPU can be a factor, especially with high resolution textures and/or high poly meshes. I had a mod once which slowed my computer to a crawl every time I looked in the direction of the alchemy lab . . . it was due to the multitude of jars which had very high poly meshes. One jar isn't a problem; one for every ingredient in MW, TRIB, and BM was a big problem. The trouble with the mod could be the sheer number of trees added.

I would recommend http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8130 if you can't get satisfaction with Vality's mods. I haven't had any trouble with it.

@2.67 ghz I assume you have an I7 920, in which case you could just overclock it, most 920's will OC to 4ghz on air, at which point you probably wouldn't be having any FPS issues, though they tend to run hot at those speeds, but a conservative 3.3-3.6 ghz overclock would get you far more out of your CPU without stressing it very much and would provide a pretty hefty performance boost. And if you are afraid of overclocking, then the other thing you may want to try is to make sure that no other programs are running in the background while you play, such as antivirus software.....

Ok after more experimentation I've found a fix. :brokencomputer:

Turns out that installing MGE and activating distant land completely alleviates my fps problems with Vality's mods. I'm now running Vality's mods at 35-45 fps thanks to MGE. I think the reason this worked is that MGE renders all of Vality's trees at a distance in a way that is either far more efficient than vanilla morrowind. In particular, I think MGE is shifting some of the rendering work off my CPU and onto my GPU so that MGE morrowind takes advantage of the GPU in a way that vanilla morrowind doesn't. As an added bonus, the game looks better than it ever has before. Totally counter-intuitive that installing MGE would actually improve my frame rate, but that's the trick...

Much thanks to the folks who offered suggestions and help!

Glad you figured out the problem! I'll try to keep this in mind if anyone else has trouble with it.