Which cities/areas should I go to test my FPS?

icetbr · Post by **icetbr** » Sat Feb 07, 2009 10:24 pm

Hi, I'm about to start playing Morrowind for the first time. However, I have a low-end PC, and I would like to know if someone could suggest some game areas that would give me low FPS, to see if that's acceptable.

I'm thinking about getting a savegame and go to these areas while running FRAPS. I just don't want to get addicted to the game and then get frustrated by sluggish scenes every now and then.

thanks

fable · Post by **fable** » Sat Feb 07, 2009 10:50 pm

The best way to check out is Balmora. If you can manage that, you're pretty safe.

dragon wench · Post by **dragon wench** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 12:50 am

It might help as well if you told us just how low end your PC is

I ran Morrowind for quite a long time on an old P3 with 384 MB RAM and a pretty mediocre graphics card. As long as I didn't add too many mods and texture replacers (which, of course, I always did

), it wasn't too bad.
I also learned how to squeeze the most I possibly could from my machine while playing Morrowind.

icetbr · Post by **icetbr** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 7:38 am

WOW! That's REALLY low end! My computer has the recommended requirements, its a Athon 64 3000+ with 3GB RAM and a Radeon 9600.

However, walking around some landscapes, I get about 15FPS

I like to play with graphics settings as high as possible. If I see I can't do that, I just might wait a few more months and try for an upgrade. I was planning on setting visibility distance to about 250% and use Anisotropic filtering.

I'll make some tests around Balmora, thanks for the advice.

fable · Post by **fable** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 9:53 am

Are you running anything outside the game, that shows up in your system tray, that you could temporarily remove while playing? Because you should get better performance with that kind of system. Do you have realtime anti-virus protection on? If so, turn it off.

dragon wench · Post by **dragon wench** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 10:31 am

icetbr wrote:WOW! That's REALLY low end! My computer has the recommended requirements, its a Athon 64 3000+ with 3GB RAM and a Radeon 9600.

However, walking around some landscapes, I get about 15FPS

I like to play with graphics settings as high as possible. If I see I can't do that, I just might wait a few more months and try for an upgrade. I was planning on setting visibility distance to about 250% and use Anisotropic filtering.

I'll make some tests around Balmora, thanks for the advice.

See, I figured *nobody* could possibly have had quite the same low end experience that I did. As you might guess... I love my new computer.

As Fable says, it is really critical to turn off AV, anti-spyware, and anything else that does not need to be running. I also found [url="http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,7604-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html"]this[/url] little tool very helpful when I was playing Morrowind on my old machine.
I'd also suggest that you turn off the music (it gets old pretty quickly so no huge loss), and the shadows (which aren't that well rendered anyway). Another technique you might want to try is switching to quadratic lighting. It looks much nicer and generally enhances game stability. You need to go into your configuration file (also called .ini) and edit the settings:

[LightAttenuation]
UseConstant=0
ConstantValue=0.0
;
UseLinear=0
LinearMethod=1
LinearValue=3.0
LinearRadiusMult=1.0
;
UseQuadratic=1
QuadraticMethod=2
QuadraticValue=16.0
QuadraticRadiusMult=1.4
;
OutQuadInLin=0

Finally, you might want to look at [url="http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/316/2/the_elder_scrolls_iii_morrowind_tweak_guide/"]Tweak Town's[/url] suggestions.

fable · Post by **fable** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 11:10 am

The excellent utility, RegCleaner, mentioned in TweakTown's guide, is deadlinked from there. Several other developers have tried to capitalize on the program's popularity with shareware or adware products of similar name. This is a working link to the original RegCleaner. Accept no substitutes!

Magelord648 · Post by **Magelord648** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 11:58 am

icetbr wrote:WOW! That's REALLY low end! My computer has the recommended requirements, its a Athon 64 3000+ with 3GB RAM and a Radeon 9600.

You're quite modest aren't you? That computer could murder Morrowind, bury it in the centre of the earth and move onto Oblivion.

Though saying that I think that Morrowind doesn't know how to utilize multiple processing cores. So if you've got those you may be at a bit of a dead end at speeding it up. (I'm not completely sure about this)

From experience FRAPS is also quite a system hog. There's a setting you can tweak in the Morrowind ini that puts a much more subtle FPS counter on the corner of the screen. So no need to run FRAPs unless you're making a video.

dragon wench · Post by **dragon wench** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 12:26 pm

[url="http://forumplanet.gamespy.com/morrowind_technical_problems/b49680/7415957/p1/?3"]This page[/url] also has a lot of helpful advice.
Even though I now have a fast, powerful machine, I still use some of the .ini tweaks suggested in the above page and the pages it links to. Doing so reduces crashing (something Morrowind is famous for) .

icetbr · Post by **icetbr** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 2:56 pm

I just saw the new water plugin for MGE 3.8. It looks awesome. It also requires PixelShader 3.0 :-(

Aylied_King · Post by **Aylied_King** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 9:37 am

Hello everybody :0 Havent been around for a while

You should use the Morrowind FPS Optimizer v2.0, that version is sorta buggy so if you dont need the land fix like I do then downgrade to V1.96

It works great.