This is a strange thing that has been happening to me for a long time, and I've mentioned it before. If I use TM to toggle my HUD off, I get a noticable FPS boost.

With mods and shaders and everything I got an average of 50-60 FPS (measured with MGE's FPS Counter) in a certain indoor location. Once I had toggled my menus off, this was up to 80. I have tested this over and over to make sure it's not a coincidence related to NPCs moving around or something, but I'm absolutely sure now.

I did notice that when I had the default Morrowind FPS counter active it would not increase FPS when I turned the menus off. But it's not a glitch with MGE's FPS counter, the increase in FPS with menus off is real: it really does play a lot smoother. So I guess that whatever is causing the FPS 'loss' with the menus on is also causing the loss with the default MW FPS Counter active.

It also seems that there isn't much of an improvement if my FPS is already very low. When I went to an exterior cell where I had 15 FPS average there was barely any difference when I toggled menus off, but in a place inside where I got 50 it changed to 80. In a different outdoor place where I got 30 it changed to 40-45.

Even without any mods, MGE, MCP or the FPS Optimizer: It still happens.

Any idea what could possibly cause this? It would be great if I could somehow have the same FPS of having the menus off when the menus are on. Does this happen to anyone else? Could someone else test it (Not with the default Morrowind FPS counter.)?

I just tried it. Its true, boosts the FPS up quite a bit. I've gotten simiular improvments as you did. My guess is that it takes a lot of stress off the CPU which would normally bottleneck the GPU. With that gone the GPU can squeeze out a few more frames. I guess a future update of MGE should add dual and quad core support to really get some more performance.

Perhaps MGE could used to show the vital info instead of the vanilla engine, thereby letting us get the benefit of higher fps without the loss in functionality.... Main one is obviously the health bar. There's already fade to black that sort of indicates your health (I believe) maybe this could be expanded? Health and magicka are the obvious ones to me.

edit - I'll test when I get home and let you know.


-kwm

That's what I was thinking too but I don't think it's really possible.

MGE can get some info from scripts (dunno if that would be faster ) and display on screen, however the effect of "TM" would have to be on, all the time. which also disables inventory, levl up menues etc. That is something we can't replace. Oh and I'm mostly speculating but I'm kinda sure about this.

Yeah, unless the menus are toggled back on every time you access your inventory or talk to an NPC or examine an item or... etc.

Which even if it were possible would probably give a bigger performance hit.

I hope so.. I mean it would be mad if MGE could draw it faster Maybe it's all because of old programming.

Yes I see what you mean re all the menu windows now that I've tried it in game. Oh well. As to fps, it would seem to be a percentage sort of boost. As I've pretty low fps most of the time I'm not seeing that much of an increase, only a point or two. Handy to know though.


-kwm

Tested it. Small interior, 75 fps normally, goes up to 105 fps after I enter tm. But wait, the game is paused.. close the (invisible) console and fps goes down to 79 fps. Same for all other environments, it increases fps by only 5% after you unpause it, which isn't too surprising with the way the HUD is drawn. Each frame around the HUD elements are made of eight pieces, this means around 40 extra draw calls. That counts as pretty terrible.

It's quite amusing people treating MGE as a feature dumping ground. Eventually all the visible features of Morrowind will be transferred to MGE with just the dry corpse of the original exe providing gameplay. Oh, and with Oblivion providing the physics.

:rofl:

Well move over, I have something else to drop on the pile.

Actually I am just curious about something, is the latest MGE beta compatible with Fligg's health shader? I have asked in a few places but haven't got a straight answer.
And I don't want to completely hijack the thread so I will start another one if the question calls for it.

This is probably the wrong forum and I should be asking in the hard ware one instead, but what's up with MGE not using quadcore? Is it that Morrowind is a single core game or something? I went to Fry's Electronics last week and they have an 8-core computer. I was like, Wow, just think what you could do with 8 processors. And then my bubble popped as I thought of Morrowind and all it's mods svcking the life out of one processor and the other 7 just sitting there not even shedding one byte of electricity. They need to make 5 GHz processors. Then our FPSs would be around 100, even in the Histaag forest with it's one billion modded additional trees!

:stare:

The latest versions of MGE do have distributed culling which uses all cores a bit, you missed it in the last thread. MGE does mostly graphics, which on DX9 is single threaded; Microsoft didn't require real multi-threading in drivers until DX11. Of course, MGE uses DX9. And that processor - 5GHz is where things start to get hot, and you need a liquid cooling system - liquid nitrogen that is.

I won't be surprised to see 5 ghz off air when they get to 22 nanometer or smaller architecture, I mean, you can hit 4 on air at 45 nanometer, and about 4.3 at 32...if you have a good processor anyways, but thats semantics, overclocking is almost needed for morrowind performance bumps, but 100 FPS is never needed, 45+ is more than sufficient for smooth gameplay in any game, but with MGE, its tough to even get that without some liquid....HELIUM.

The key question here,
Has anyone tried with the help of Graphics Extender / Script Extender to do this?

One thing is to speculate, quite another to attempt it and possibly succeed.

^_^