Hello Folks

I have a couple of quick questions to ask, so I will keep this post sweet and simple...

I have been doing some experimenting around with the MGE attempting to get the most out of my Morrowind game.
My initial goal was to enable anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and a select few shaders to pretty up the game.
However, upon loading my game, I found that the most I could get out of my frame rate was between 10 and 20 frames.
I played around with bunches of settings trying to claw back my performance, even disabling the distant land feature, and
no matter what I do the game will stay between 10 and 20 frames. This may be due to the number of mods that I have running,
but I still should not have to much of a problem with a Core i7, and a Radeon HD 4870 x2.

So my main question is whether I am able to tell MGE, or even Morrowind, to take advantage of more than one Core and GPU at
a time.

Thank you for any future input on this topic.

-Rabbit-

if you can get 10-20 frames outside, you are doing good with MGE and lots of high-end texture packs, along with lots of mods. I suspect you will find the majority of people here are not getting more than 20 FPS in exterior city cells. I am lucky to get 15 on my rig ,and its only marginally lesser than yours.

Turn the AA down to 2x and the AF down to 4x and you'll get better performance and not a great loss in visual quality in my experience. Also lower the in-game FPS to 60 in the ini file...this can make a big difference.

Hmm, I didn't realize that it was a fairly common problem
I may need to cut back on the mods that I am using and go
with just the basics then, and skip the whole MGE thing all
together.

Thanks for the input though.

-Rabbit-

Actually, without too much stuff enabled, I actually can get up to about 25-30 on the exteriors, this is with texture replacers and such. But yea, with all the mods that have scripts I run, I get about 10-20. My computer is like over 2 years old and wasnt top of the line when I got it.

Have you tried running morrowind with just one GPU? I have a 295 gt which is a mult gpu card, once I turned off one of the gpus I gained about 5+ fps.

You might be surprised to find dropping MGE isn't going to help much. Morrowind is very CPU bound, and MGE utilizes more than one core, along with being hard on the GPU. So dropping MGE just lessens the load on your GPU and 2+ cores, it won't help the game engine render any faster.

MGE runs slower with two cards than it does with one. You need to disable crossfire / sli for it and it will run faster.

:blink:

What shaders were you trying to run, and how many cells was Distant Land set for? I have the exact same card and an older CPU (quad core Q9650 @ 3Ghz), and I have no discernible difference in performance between a fully modded MW running with MGE or without. Framerate is 40 - 60 in interiors, and a stable 30 in exteriors. And that's with enough texture replacers to sink a ship.

Though, granted, I don't use AA--I have AF enabled (16x), but not AA since for some reason it causes my video card to lock up and the display driver to reset. :brokencomputer: Distant Land is only at 4 cells, too, as a matter of personal preference.

If you're trying to use shaders like SSAO, those are huge performance hitters no matter what computer you're using. But some of the Bloom/HDR shaders and the like are pretty gentle, FPS-wise.

I'm running an I7@4ghz with Radeon 5970, disabling the card's internal crossfire results in slightly higher FPS but a really nasty jittering, on average I'm getting 40-60fps, modded up to the hilt but no shaders, I suspect they're the heavy hitters.

lowering resolution a bit usually gains me heaps of frames, though vurt's work has destroyed my exterior FPS untill i lowered grass density to ~25 and shorted my crazy high view distance.

No, that depends on which driver you are using, i've doubled my FPS when setting the Catalyst AI to the highest, with some drivers (sorry can't recall with which version). This is a well known problem with the ATI drivers, some works great with crossfire, some doesnt seem to work at all.

Guru3d.com is a good forum for these questions, many people there seems to be almost addicted to testing new drivers / performance, and they're often helpful and knowledgeable.