Lobster on 1/6/2002 at 06:41
If I try running Morrowind on a Geforce 2 mx card with 128 ram will the game suffer terribly? What would the effects be?
ACT SMILEY on 1/6/2002 at 09:45
It'd run fine, you wouldn't get the directx8 water and you'd probably need to run it in 800x600 with middle view distance and realtime shadows off, but it'd run ok.
hokaloogie on 1/6/2002 at 10:53
I play it with 192MB of RAM and a 32MB Vanta and it... er... runs. :p
It's not brilliant but it isn't extremely horrible (around 17 fps outside. :p).
You should be fine.
Lobster on 1/6/2002 at 19:53
Thanks
I guess it's worth getting
zily on 3/6/2002 at 17:00
also, RAM is really really cheap nowadays. when I upgraded from 128 to 256, I noticed a significant performance increase. I run a p3 800, tnt2 ultra (32mb), and 256 sdram. I put my resolution down to ultra chunky (640x480), and lowered my view distance as low as it would go, and I get okay framerate(~22) outside, and excellent framerate (~50) indoors. But your video card is a whole lot better than mine
Tuco on 3/6/2002 at 22:39
ohh ohh I get to complain some more.
Morrorun's graphics engine is crap. There is no LoD bias for the polygons, and a crappy one for the textures... this means crap framerates for no reason. The textures aren't even large compared to other games out there, and it SUCKS!! =D
Serious Sam > Morrowind.
Tra Hari on 4/6/2002 at 03:49
I'm not familiar with the term LoD. LoD == ? The Serious Sam engine is indeed impressive, but I must say that it's not as gorgeous as Morrowind's. Definitely close; I dig detail textures, and kinda wish they had them in Morrowind. . .but the water, sky, and texturing work in Morrowind is quite impressive.
In any case, I'm posting to add my own voice to the chorus: I, too, experience icky slowness. My system: Duron 900 oc'ed to 1ghz; 320mb RAM; gf3 ti 200; all this in Win2k.
Outside, I generally get ~20 fps with view at anywhere between 50% and 25%. I never have shadows on; although the performance hit is usually negligible (1 or 2 frames), it will occasionally flip out in weird places, dropping me down by anywhere from 5 to 10.
In towns, I get about half that, sometimes dropping into 5 fps, necessitating a view decrease down to 25%, although rarely lower.
Indoors is better, usually running ~50 fps, although in Balmora and Ald'ruhn Mages Guilds, it occasionally drops to town levels in large rooms. However, for the most part, indoors are a pleasure.
The unSafeDisc patch netted me about 5 or so frames, making my outdoor average somewhere closer to ~30. Unfortunately, Morrowind became much more unstable. Yick.
Gods, I wish I wasn't this obsessive about this, but it drives me nuts. I'm hoping a patch manages to fix at least some of the framerate issues. I'm also wondering if an upgrade to some manner of Athlon isn't in order. They're cheap enough these days.
- Tra'Hari
Tuco on 4/6/2002 at 04:04
Oh, sorry, must be making up acronyms again. LoD = Level of Detail.
Basically, if a monster is 100 feet away, with a good LoD bias engine, it'll have some 5 polygons, and if it's close, it'll have 200 polygons(Yes, these are just pulled from the air).
I looked at the wireframe models in MW(using the console, forget the command), and MW had none of that =\, which is probably why the framerates are unnecisarely bad for it's looks...
zily on 4/6/2002 at 05:57
Yeah. Only options are pixel shading, View distance, shadows, and resolution.
As for the graphics themselves, the game looks AWESOME at 1280x1024. Of course, I would like to see someone that can run "toMorrow Runs" att hat resolution. I'm suprised it also doesn't have options like polygon detail at ALL. Like, in quake 3, before I found WickedGL, I always lower polygons and textures to the min. (of course, after WickedGL, got my 40fps constant with a voodoo3 3000. Full detail, full polygons, 1024x768).
Tra Hari on 4/6/2002 at 07:56
Tuco:
I figured it was something like that. Also, it's not surprising that this would slow the game down by quite a bit. Seems like that could be improved with a better processor, although I could be mistaken. It might also explain why resolution makes absolutely _no_ difference in fps, whereas view distance does.
zily:
The game does look gorgeous at 1280 x 960 (at least on my computer, the max is 1280 x 960, though my monitor can do 1280 x 1024).
And, I do run it at that resolution, primarily because lowering the resolution doesn't do anything for my framerates. Seriously; in Balmora, it makes no noticeable difference in framerates between 640 x 480 and 1280 x 960. _Maybe_ there's a frame or two difference, but I never noticed. This is particularly frustrating because I would gladly lower my res to something like 1024 x 768 if I thought I could get a steady 30 fps; I'm not that picky that I'd sacrifice prettiness for smoothness of play. The problem is, res makes no difference.
In fact, the only thing out of all of those options that affects my framerate is View Distance (with the occasional shadow weirdness that only seems to happen indoors), which is maddening to have to turn down. As I was approaching Mzuleft (I believe), I saw a hint of a tower and just for grins, I turned the view distance all the way up. I wish I could see all of this gorgeousness as it comes into view, without seeing most of what makes this game so incredible obscured by what may as well be called clipping fog.
Blarg. I'm just slightly more bitter than usual because I'm tired and it's absurdly late. ;)
Regards,
- Tra'Hari Vandaette
