25 replies to this topic

[khay]

Ladies and gentlemen, I`m sure many of you wondered how would a game such as Morrowind run on a latest-trend system. Well I can`t show you that, but what I CAN show you is how it runs on mine.

- Pentium III Coppermine 800MHz
- 384MB RAM
- GeForce 4 MX 420 (Palit Daytona)

I made an Argonian and installed a minimal amount of mods: Wakim`s Game Improvements, Adjustable Magicka Regen, Cait`s Creatures Unleashed, Creature Pack 1.1, Fishing Academy 2.53, Morrowind Cities UnMod, Baldurdash Text Patch and some extra classes. No texture updates. Two screenshots posted, everything was set to MINIMUM, that includes both draw distance and music volume. Resolution is 640x480, pics were resized to 1024x768, because that is how the game looked like on my monitor. No FPS optimizer was used, it slows the game even more (?).

First is a view of Seyda Neen. Please note the extraordinary particle texture effects and shadowing, while taking into account the unusually high FPS amount displayed in the bottom right corner of the screenshot. Also do not forget the amazingly realistic water effects achieved to Pixel Shader 3.0, technology only available on my system!! With such realism floating around, no wonder games become more and more associated with reality!



Yet another screenshot, this time showing One-Who-Is-Pixelated, my Argonian character:



And the final piece of extra-detailed artwork, this time One-Who-Is-Pixelated is relaxing and enjoying the sunset together with some of the inhabitants of the small town Seyda Neen. Remarkably higher FPS can be noticed when walking around here:



This concludes the 'Why I am not playing Morrowind, but learning to mod it' session. Kthxbye.

[Archmage Silver]

Well, at least you used time to explain it.

[Tom]

haha, point taken. I wont even ask what happens in combat

[khay]

One-Who-Is-Pixelated wins. If the battle is against rats and/or mudcrabs, that is.

[Tom]

Wait a minute... are those chickens I see in the last screenshot? Is that some sort of mod?

[Tom]

Score!

[Fallen Paladin]

When I first installed morrowind i had a Duron 750, 256MB sdram, Riva TNT2. I finnished all the Seyda Neen quests on this system while begging my parents for money to upgrade my system.

[Tom]

Heh, morrowind was one of the things that made me want a new system too... An expensive game, that

[CaenJade]

On very High end it runs great no matter what. On this computer P4 3g, GeForce 5950, 2 gig ram I never get slowdown unless I have like 6 different people casting spells on my screen. Just a note but if you play newer games with less than a gig of ram you will get slowdown problems, 512mb IS NOT ENOUGH, and 768mb is pushing it. While Morrowind is not new Bethesda did a HORRIBLE job optimizing their graphics system so the amount of work required to run their textures, pixels, and polys is only handled well by higher end stuff.

[Garumn]

HAHahaha, 2 gig of RAM??????????

Your system is definately not v.optimised as I can play Morrowind with 256mb, all settings on max(view distance and shadows maxed out, 1024+768 resolution)with constant 40 fps, Ive got the textures upgrade mod installed which adds high resolution textures to the game, then ive got Leafy Morrowind and Forrested Morrowind mods installed.And with all this I get absolutely no slowdowns.My secret is that i keep very little or none programs running in Taskbar.In benchmarks my system scores the same as 512mb machine with around 10 progs in the taskbar.

Btw my machine specs are:Athlon XP 2300+, 256mb Crucial ram, Asus Radeon 9550GE(OCed and watercooled to 9600 pro),2 7200 RPM harddrives, Zalman 5.1 headphones.15 inch monitor.Gigabyte mobo.

[oralpain]

Unless you edit the ini file and tell morrowind to cache more, it will almost never used more than 100 megs of ram or so.

It was made for the X-Box, wich has 64MB of ram.

CPU and graphics speed are important, but morrowind really does not use much memory.

[Tom]

It was made for the X-Box, wich has 64MB of ram.

No, it was made for the PC and adopted by the XBox. I think it came out before XBox did.

[Archmage Silver]

It indeed did come out earlier than teh x-bow-box

[oralpain]

It was still made with the xbox in mind and they had to make some comprimises to the PC version becasue of that. Doing an extensive conversion would have been uneconomical.

Edited by oralpain, 27 April 2005 - 08:07 PM.

[Tom]

It was still made with the xbox in mind and they had to make some comprimises to the PC version becasue of that. Doing an extensive conversion would have been uneconomical.

Heh, so youre saying that it was intended to be even MORE demanding? I dont think it would have run on computers at the time of release if it was.

[Rastor]

Unless you edit the ini file and tell morrowind to cache more, it will almost never used more than 100 megs of ram or so.

It was made for the X-Box, wich has 64MB of ram.

CPU and graphics speed are important, but morrowind really does not use much memory.

How do you do that?

[oralpain]

Increase the interior and exterior cell buffers. Load times get longer, but happen much less often.

[Rastor]

Increase the interior and exterior cell buffers. Load times get longer, but happen much less often.

And you do that how?

[Tom]

In the morrowind.ini file, in the morrowind directory change the values of:
Interior Cell Buffer=10
Exterior Cell Buffer=32
Depending on how much RAM you have, 128 and 256 respectively should be appropriate (for 512-1024mb)