Masakado on 11/6/2004 at 15:29
I've been playing Morrowind for a while now (I completed the game once and finished nearly all the quests including both expansions, which should be a good indicator of just how much of a chunk of my life this game has claimed) but no matter what I do, I just can't seem to get this game running well...which is kind of odd as my hardware is reasonably high-end.
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Asus A7V8X mobo
512MB PC2700 (I think) DDR RAM
Geforce FX 5950 Ultra
SB Audigy 2
Running at 1024 x 768 with no AA or AF, view distance at slightly over half, AI distance as low as possible, and the .ini file tweaked to lower the maximum FPS, I still get really shoddy performance most places outdoors, with framerates dipping into the low teens. If there's a good deal going on (ie fighting multiple nasties and the like) often the game will freeze for 5~10 seconds for a time before you can resume play. It's still perfectly playable, but still somewhat annoying, especially considering that with my hardware setup I'd think I should be able to play with most of the bells and whistles turned on--and I can run most other games full blast with no or few problems. Obviously something is creating a bottleneck, but I don't know what--any ideas? Is there some sort of tweaking that can increase performance, or am I going to have to spring for an upgrade of some sort? (which would be annoying as my PC's only a little more than a year old)
Skronk on 11/6/2004 at 19:31
You should be getting stellar performance with that setup. My own PC is an AthlonXP 2000+, 512MB DDR ram, and a Radeon 9600SE, and my FPS rarely drops below 30. This is with double the maximum draw distance :ebil: (do a forum search for 'fps optimizer' to find the mod that allows that).
Have you run any spyware removal tools, like Spybot Search&Destroy, or Ad-Aware? The only thing I can think of is that something is hogging your CPU cycles. Oh, turn off shadows ingame too, they are not very good anyways (never cast by light sources, just randomly overlayed onto the terrain...)
Chimpy Chompy on 11/6/2004 at 19:42
Or you could run around staring at your feet. Framerate shoots right up then! In fact I was almost reduced to doing that in Solstheim, where performance was extra-crap.
Sapiens on 11/6/2004 at 20:52
The bottleneck here is the Morrowind engine. It renders
everything in range, even if you can't actually see it (type
twf in the console for a good example). Most game engines render the world in such a way that what you can't see -- those character models behind a building, the small shop obscured by a tower, the river you can hear down the road, the second floor inside a building when you're downstairs. Morrowind doesn't do this, primarily because the flexibility of its plugin system requires that you to be able to drop things into the world without recompiling the entire gameworld for a week. The upside is that you can fling structures and whatnot across the landscape at will, but the downside is the way the engine has to render everything for that type of customization to be feasible.
The pauses you're experiencing are most likely caused by the engine loading up a new section of the gameworld. You can remedy this to some extent by making the pauses less frequent but longer -- look in your morrowind.ini and change
DontThreadLoad to 0. Also, Morrowind is a fairly CPU-dependant game; I noticed a huge FPS increase when I upgraded from a 2400+ to a 3000+, especially with FSAA and AF enabled. If you're running with either of those you might consider disabling them, or at least toning them down a bit. [Edit: Re-read your post, looks like you aren't. Nevermind.] You might want to make sure you're running the latest drivers for your GFFX as well.
A thorough tweaking guide can be found at (
http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=guide&dId=316) TweakTown.
Masakado on 12/6/2004 at 00:52
Quote Posted by Sapiens
The pauses you're experiencing are most likely caused by the engine loading up a new section of the gameworld. You can remedy this to some extent by making the pauses less frequent but longer -- look in your morrowind.ini and change
DontThreadLoad to 0. Also, Morrowind is a fairly CPU-dependant game; I noticed a huge FPS increase when I upgraded from a 2400+ to a 3000+, especially with FSAA and AF enabled. If you're running with either of those you might consider disabling them, or at least toning them down a bit. [Edit: Re-read your post, looks like you aren't. Nevermind.] You might want to make sure you're running the latest drivers for your GFFX as well.
A thorough tweaking guide can be found at (
http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=guide&dId=316) TweakTown.
Thanks for the link, the tips there helped a little, though most of them I'd already tried. Strangely enough changing DontThreadLoad to 0 made the "Loading Area" pauses shorter. Now at 70% view distance (no ai or shadows) I can get up into the mid-20s most crowded places, though at full distance in places like Balmora it still dips into the 11-14 fps range.
I'm not 100% sure that the pauses I was experiencing are the engine loading new sections of gameworld because frequently they'll happen when I'm not actually moving anywhere. For example when pulling up status screens it'll frequently lock up for a couple of seconds before letting me do anything. (And if you open up the status screen after casting a spell with the sparks still flying around, it slows to a crawl...)
On further inspection, it does look though like the CPU is working really hard when Morrowind is going--with no other major processes running aside from a performance monitor that came with the mobo, it looks like CPU is being maxed out at 100% usage most of the time. I'm almost tempted to try and OC it, but have to be wary with that as in the past this PC has had really serious problems with overheating. (the fan I first used when I built the PC was defective) I suppose I'll have to upgrade it--what a pain, considering I more or less built this computer specifically so I could have something that Morrowind would run well on. :P
Brad Schoonmaker on 12/6/2004 at 16:16
This helps me, too. I have nearly the same issues, but not near as severe.
The bottleneck is often tightly grouped light sources for me. I realised this when working with the Construction Set. There were a couple dozen torches within 100 foot range of each other and the fps was probably less than 1. :erg:
My specs:
AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Asus A7N8X-E mobo
1 gig PC2700 DDR RAM
ATI Radeon 8500DV (64 mb)
SB PCI512 soundcard
I've only upgraded the mobo and memory from 512 mb in the last weak, but I haven't seen real improvement in the game so hearing that the CPU is what Morrowind depends on so much makes since to me.
Masakado on 12/6/2004 at 23:17
Quote Posted by Brad Schoonmaker
I've only upgraded the mobo and memory from 512 mb in the last weak, but I haven't seen real improvement in the game so hearing that the CPU is what Morrowind depends on so much makes since to me.
Well, maybe, and maybe not. I was running my PC with these stats (except with a GeForce 4 Ti initially, instead of the FX F950 which I got more recently) for about three months with a faulty fan that wasn't cooling the processor enough, creating emergency shutdowns and all. With a bigger, better fan and heat sink that problem is no more, but there's a good chance that the time with the bad fan did some damage to the processor which is causing the bottleneck.
Though it might indeed be your processor as I think there's a fairly significant difference between an 1800+ and a 2800+...
Brad Schoonmaker on 13/6/2004 at 04:26
The difference is slight I think, though. I tried a 2500+ before going back to my original 1800+ after seeing only minor improvement with benchmarking.
There are slowdowns like you describe on my setup, but like you said it's something one can live with. Mine aren't really that bad anyway. Finding a reason for this makes it easier still to live with.
