Hi, friend of mine recently 'convinced' me to try morrowind again by giving me his version of the game that contains well over 200 mods...

It runs, but there are a couple of issues; the most significant of which being performance.

When I first start the game, performance in the boat is 'ok' especially if I'm facing the wall (around 10 FPS otherwise, which isn't what I'd expect...), but as soon as I get up on the deck and face Seyda Neen it all goes to [censored] - around 4-5 FPS, infact - going upstairs in the tradehouse occassionaly drops this to 0.5 FPS(!!). Seyda Neen is probably the worst area I've found so far, but even in Balmora I still get lag spikes - the wilderness seems fine though. It doesn't matter if I'm using MGE or not (disabling it through the MGEGUI menu) or if I'm using MCA.

Another thing is that the character gen process seems screwy, I can move freely right from the start and a couple of the dialogs (such as just before you select your race and before selecting a class) are missing; Not a big deal but something that was working fine until I changed one thing or another -- might've been installing librarian/Book Rotate and running the BR patcher?

My system specs are as follows (I would assume it'd be plenty considering I can play modded oblivion on high w. QTP3 etc):
AMD Athlon II 240 @ 2.8GHz (not brilliant but more than sufficient I'd have though)
ATI Radeon 4870 1GB using Catalyst 10.5 (latest)
2x2GB DDR3 G.Skill Ripjaws
GA-MA74GMT-S2 motherboard (el cheapo, but again should be fine.)

Now, the guy I got it off isn't, well, the cleverest about so I'm assuming there's a massive mod imcompatability somwhere. I'm still trying different things, but about the only other possible explanation I've found is that my video card seems to be downclocking to 600MHz (2D mode) randomly before jumping back up - I don't have a clue how to fix that, though. I'll try disabling all the mods when I get home and will post the results here. Given the eratic nature of the FPS drops (fine one minute and drops right down the next) that could actually be it.

Anyway, I guess you want the modlist: http://morrowind.pastebin.com/ZmuRKn3q . There are a few other texture replacers and whatnot on top of that, but given my system specs I doubt they're a problem. Using MLOX and the latest database if that helps.

I'd appreciate any sort of advice right now, regarding performance or not as it's bugging me not being able to play again

Thanks either way, Charon_

Welcome to the forum. :talk:

I can help you to increase the FPS, so you need to edit the morrowind.ini file which is located in this folder.

\Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind

Contents in morrowind.ini file:

[General];Test TES 0=morrowind.esm;Starting Cell=Pelagiad;Starting Grid X=0;Starting Grid Y=0Show FPS=0Max FPS=60

If the last line have a value of 240 or lower than 10-15 you can change it to 60 FPS and save the changes.
Reboot your PC and launch Morrowind again. :user:

I think the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1083121-relz-mlox-a-tool-for-anolyzing-and-sorting-your-load-order/ is what you need to know more about.

Hi, thanks!

I'm already using MLOX, but I'm near 100% certain it's a mod or a collection of mods now. Removing everything under the [GameFiles] section of the ini and just renabling Tribunal/Bloodmoon/Morrowind esm's meant I was getting anywhere inbetween 40 and 60 FPS with MGE, a couple of shaders and a longer view distance. I'm *really* not looking forward to disabling these one by one, but I'll go back over the list and try disabling more obvious culprits.

Just to be clear, MLOX isn't giving me any major conflicts - something about awakening the dreamers having a miscalculated spell, reminding me to use the latest MWE/MWSE/MGE and mentioning the fact that the bloodmoon texture seams fix is included in the landscape overhaul. It complains whenever I try and use any of the merged lists from TESTool so instead I'm using Mashed_Lists from Wyre Mash which I figure does the same thing.

You can also read the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1068986-wrye-mash-thread-5/ thread if you want to learn how to use it. :read:

Well, changing "Max FPS" in Morrowind.ini is not actually going to do any thing to improve FPS performance, but the default of 240 is too high, and 60 seems more reasonable, as the eye can't really see much more than 30+ frames per second anyway.

It may be tedious, but I'd either reinstall and slowly add your mods until performance starts to degrade, or else use the http://www.mwmythicmods.com/argent/tech/bin_srch.html method to see if you can find a culprit. It's brute force, but it often results in finding the problem plugin.

The problem is never too many mods, but out-of-date hardware. :hehe:

:bolt:

And TESIII's own inefficiency. Try reducing the number of mods that use oodles of scripts running all the time. http://www.gamesas.com/?showtopic=877881. Any recent hardware (past 5 years or so): texture replacers have no impact.

My findings contradict that statement - on a nearly six year old PentiumD 3.0GHz system w/ nvidia 8800GT SC 512MB card, Darknut's 1024 better body clothing texture replacer impacts FPS compared to his 512 version when many NPCs are in one area (e.g. Seyda Neen). Video memory is sufficient to load the higher detailed textures, but the render engine bogs down a bit trying to display them on more than a few NPCs.

I don't remember the exact FPS hit, but it was noticeable. And that was tested with MGE distantland active (one of the earlier v3.8.0 revisions, probably before rev0117).

In the long term, you might want to check the description of each mod you got in your loadlist and ask yourself "Do I really want that in my game?". There's no point in keeping mods you will never actually use or that you don't care about in your game.

Interesting. Is it a code problem that could be addressed via the code patch, or something inherently inefficient about the entire Gamebryo engine? What about regular RAM? I'm not an expert or even a knowledgeable amateur when it comes to how software uses the hardware available - e.g. a game engine and the GPU, CPU, vRAM and regular RAM.

I highly recommend Timeslip's .exe optimizer. Before using it, the FPS Optimizer would maybe let me see the Razor Hole from the Mage's Guild, now if I hop on top of the guild, I can see across the Odai.

I'd like to see your load list I'm running something like 217 (not counting texture re-placers) mods in my current game and i have a 1.8 ghz Sepron 1.5 gig of ram and a 128mb ati 9250 (no MGE for me) and i haven't sunk below 8 fps I'm usually over 20. I'm guessing it's script related I have given myself some really odd shutter/slideshow experiences with bad or conflicting scripts.

Thanks for the replies!

Alaisiagae,

Ha, I -seriously- doubt it's my hardware! I know Morrowind doesn't take advantage of dual cores and whatnot, but even at 2.8Ghz it should be fine... The 4870 is, what, 50% faster than an 8800 Ultra as well?

Game engines have the option of loading textures into either vram or system ram. The majority of the time vram is used as it's faster and there are certain tricks that can be used to make it faster still, either way commonly-used textures are cached and so there shouldn't be much of an impact using them. Morrowind texture replacers aren't exactly intensive anyway; think about it, something like Darker Morrowind is, what, 165MB compressed? Even if it were 400MB uncompressed (highly unlikely), how much of it could actually be loaded at a given time? Certainly less than 200MB (heck, less than 100 even depending on the area) which is why 'modern' hardware shouldn't see a noticeable impact on performance. As soon as the data loaded in vram exceeds vram size, paging occurs which causes *huge* slow downs on any machine.

Getting off the tangent horse there, I don't see why having multiple NPC's with high-res textures would cause slowdown. Are you sure it's not script/AI related?

@Rattlesnake
Thanks, I'll give the exe optimiser a go. Is it compatible with MCP or?

latendresse76, My modlist is in the OP: http://morrowind.pastebin.com/ZmuRKn3q . Considering you're getting good performance on your system, I'd definately say it's a mod issue!

But yeah, I think I'm going to have to try disabling a few mods (right now I'm thinking it's a NPC scheduling issue, I think a couple of mods are trying to do the same thing there). Talking to the guy I got all of these off and apparently he just went loopy on empirical morrowind :shocking:

Again, thanks and I'll let you know how it goes.

Absolutely certain it's not script/AI related, because if it were then the fps loss would remain after changing to the smaller 512 texture sizes.

You have a good point about paging occurring. There's also limitations of the MW engine in how it handles rendering and fetching textures (i.e. not capable of directly fetching off of vram and has to load textures into system ram before rendering).

Our hardware may have improved over the years, but the MW engine is the same ol' horse.