havin' some technical difficulties.

steppin' razor on 17/2/2004 at 04:13

so i finally (finally!) got a computer that won't (in theory) crawl into the corner and cry if i tried to play Morrowind on it. so i load it up and everything's good for a while. then i start messin' around with the options, and things start to lag like mad. so i set my resolution to 600 x 800, got my 'see into the distance' to about half way (only 'cause i'm on a little side quest and have to see a ways), my AI distance almost to near, real time shadows to off. still having problems. the sound's also gone wonky (dunno if it's connected...?) it's all scratchy, like a scratched up CD, and there's an annoying constant buzz in the background (it just turned to night, and the sound thing got really bad).

as far as i can tell, i've got the requirements (and possibly then some). i've got pentium 4, windows 98, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 (anything else you wanna know, let me know and i'll try to find out. i'm not exactly a whiz when i come to computers...)

so, what could my problem be? and how could i fix it?

oh, and a semi-related question. which is better, Radeon 7000 or NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440?

thanks much,

-s'r

Nanol on 17/2/2004 at 10:05

First of all with performance it's best to take a look at (http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=guide&dId=316&dPage=1) Tweaktown's guide. I've had acceptable framerates on an MX but nowhere near as good as on say a 4200. After the Tweaktown guide try getting the morrowind FPS optimizer and killing all the applications you don't need in the background. If the quest you're doing Fargoth's treasure then the FPS optimizer will help, just wheel scroll to increase the view distance, and scroll back when you've seen where he is.

Is your sound ok with other games / applications? If you have just 2 speakers the lead should be in the green port at the back normally. Are some additional effects enabled in a program like Audio HQ (reverb might sound scratchy).

A GeForce 4 MX is better at most things than a Radeon 7000 - the 7000 is actually the equivelant to the original Radeon 32 Meg, released to fight the low end GeForce 2. It's just a terrible card by GeForce 4 or Radeon 8x00 standards, which it was released to compete with. All of these older cards are now starting to lose support in modern games, shame really, I had an original AIW Radeon that ran beautifully over the years.
--=--
Nan.

steppin' razor on 17/2/2004 at 18:26

thanks much, i'll try those suggestions. and no, my sound is fine on other games, which is why i thought this was so weird.

also, i did a little closer reading on another thread where the person seemed to be having the same sorts of troubles. someone suggested getting spybot and/or ad-aware to clear out all the spyware on the hard drive. i did so, and that seemed to do the trick, though i still had to keep settings to off/near, and the rain made it start lagging again (though not nearly as bad). so did too much running, strangely enough. guess i'm just too fast for my computer ;)

oh, and i'm having another problem. i tried installing the patch (version 1.2, i think) and it froze my computer each time i tried it. it froze at 33%, when it said it was processing data files. so, do i even need a patch at all? is there another version that would be better?

anyhoo, thanks again,

-s'r

Forsythe on 17/2/2004 at 22:08

The patch isn't vital per se., but it fixes a few glitches. How long did you wait? (I seem to recall the patch taking awhile, and even longer when loading/converting a pre-patch savegame)

Tuco on 17/2/2004 at 23:13

You're complaining about bad framerates? Morrowind was so easy that I played it without using a monitor!

Forsythe on 17/2/2004 at 23:34

You just needed to plug it in, Tuco ;)

steppin' razor on 18/2/2004 at 03:17

Tuco: i agree with Forsythe, you needed to plug it in. :tsktsk:

Forsythe: i waited about ten minutes, the first time, then tried to hit cancel and everything froze right up. i didn't wait that long the next two times. the second time, alt+ctrl+delete did the trick. the third time, it froze again.

anyhoo, if the patch isn't vital, i think i'll not bother. this is only my first time though, so i probably won't notice anyway.

-s'r

:

Tuco on 18/2/2004 at 11:42

I could've plugged it in, but only pussies play with monitors. Hell, Morrowind is so easy that half the time I didn't use a mouse. And I was the first person to beat it!

Wasn't it striker that played with a TNT 2?

Striker on 18/2/2004 at 12:41

Yep. And that's much worse than playing with no monitor, let me tell you! :P

-Striker