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wesmjohn
Baron of the Court
Joined: 27 Dec 2001
Posts: 326
Location: Kentucky |
| My disappointing return to RPG gaming |
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Hey everyone. After my love affair with Gothic burned out, I forgot about role-playing games for a while and Grand Theft Auto 3 took up most of my time.
And then I recently bought Morrowind. I have been exceedingly disappointed with the performance of this game.
My system specs: PIII 866 mhz, 384 megs ram, 128 mb V-tek Xtacy Geforce 4 ti4600 3d card, Soundblaster Live! Value.
The performance of Morrowind on my souped-up comp is, to be perfectly frank, ATROCIOUS.
I encounter frequent stuttering no matter what settings I have the game on. Even at 640x480 the game stutters and the frame-rate is low.
I get about 60-100 fps in buildings, but an abominable 5-18 in towns and large caves, and about 25-30 in the wilderness.
Unacceptable. UNACCEPTABLE!!!
I have one of the best video cards money can buy. I bought it so games would NOT stutter any more. And I'm hearing about guys playing this game on a TNT2, the same POS card I took OUT for the Geforce 4. How can they beat this game with a fourth of my video memory and a scant fraction of my fillrate, while I can't even get the damn thing PLAYABLE!?
Here's what I've tried:
1. The patch for the game
2. The no-cd and fixed-exe cracks
3. Tweaking my card from the windows display options
4. Tweaking my card using NVmax
5. The frame-rate optimizer written by that Russian guy
6. Too many adjustments to mention from various tweak guides
And has any of it helped? Helped enough to make the game truly playable and maybe even (oh, dare I say it?) FUN!?
NO!
If anybody's got some idea of some miracle fix, some panacea, some little thing I might have missed to help get better performance out of Morrowind, then I'd deeply appreciate the help.
Christ, I thought Gothic was a system-hog. Ignorance is bliss... |
Wed Jul 03, 2002 3:33 am |
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Llama
High Emperor
Joined: 11 Oct 2001
Posts: 509
Location: Earth |
quote:
I encounter frequent stuttering no matter what settings I have the game on. Even at 640x480 the game stutters and the frame-rate is low.
Resolution has no direct bearing on fps for this game (even though Bethesda claims it does).
quote:
I get about 60-100 fps in buildings, but an abominable 5-18 in towns and large caves, and about 25-30 in the wilderness.
That's odd, my Athlon 800 with a Ti4200 and 512 megs RAM never drops below 13 fps in towns, and a dip that low is almost rare.
quote:
I have one of the best video cards money can buy. I bought it so games would NOT stutter any more.
All the video card power in the world won't help the fact that your CPU speed is bottle-necking your video card. You'd get the exact same performance from your computer if you had a Ti4400, or a Ti4200. You'd only get slightly less performance from a Ti500 or a Ti200 also.
Your video card is simply too fast for your processor for it to make a difference in high quality gaming.
quote:
And I'm hearing about guys playing this game on a TNT2, the same POS card I took OUT for the Geforce 4. How can they beat this game with a fourth of my video memory and a scant fraction of my fillrate, while I can't even get the damn thing PLAYABLE!?
Probably because their computers are faster than yours, allowing them to get increased performance (a few fps here and there). But your scores aren't bad, as the game is VERY playable @ 25-30fps, considering 99% of every fight you'll have will be outside of town, there is nothing to worry about. MW is a slow-paced game, it's not supposed to be Quake 3.
quote:
Christ, I thought Gothic was a system-hog. Ignorance is bliss...
lol
I never though Gothic was a system hog once I switched out my old Voodoo 5.  |
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Wed Jul 03, 2002 4:51 am |
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XeroX
The MasterCopy
Joined: 13 Dec 2001
Posts: 7125
Location: The Netherlands |
Maybe u have to upgrade your processor.
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Wed Jul 03, 2002 3:12 pm |
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Aeolus
Village Dweller
Joined: 31 May 2002
Posts: 19
Location: UK |
Personally I find anything above 5 FPS to be playable.
Not nice but playable. I'm currently playing gta3 at 9-15 FPS.
As for Morrowind... well I won't even dare to try it on my ageing P3 450 & Ye Olde Picture Maker Riva TNT .
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Wed Jul 03, 2002 5:01 pm |
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The Hurricane
Tempered Warlord
Joined: 01 Jun 2002
Posts: 299
Location: The Sword Coast |
I can admit, that this game is more say..cpu extensive then graphic card extensive. Has - Anthlon 1900+ XP 1.6Ghz, 512 DDR RAM, Ge3 Ti500.
Never goes below 15-20fps
but...I have to admit that the engine needs some serious fixing. I've played games with way better graphics(imo), etc with way better performance on my cpu.
I can run Gothic with everything on high with zero slowdown. And gothic is rather eyepleasing with 300% view distance on. Yes, I know there is a big diff. between Morrowind and Gothic, but why couldn't Bethseda just go with a graphics engine like Gothics? imo, both MW and Gothics graphics are equaling eyepleasing, and the 300% view distance rules.
Oh well, here's the good news, there's an optimizer out there that makes Morrowind enjoyable. There is a link on the board. You should try that, made my Morrowind exp. 100% more enjoyable. You need this optimizer!
Also Gothic II is on its way.  
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Thu Jul 04, 2002 7:03 am |
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The Hurricane
Tempered Warlord
Joined: 01 Jun 2002
Posts: 299
Location: The Sword Coast |
Oops!  Sorry, I saw that you've already tried the optimizer with no luck...
Don't know what to tell you, the game engine just sucks, very cpu extensive....you could:
1) upgrade your RAM/processor
2) wait for a possible fix-it from Bethesda (very unlikely)
3) wait for Gothic II to arrive
I think this game brings every system to its knees
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Thu Jul 04, 2002 7:14 am |
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Loremaster
Village Leader
Joined: 31 Mar 2002
Posts: 88
Location: Hampshire, England |
Make sure your system is optimised. No background programs, scandisk and defrag run, all the usual fine-tuning done to ensure maximum performance. People are enjoying the game with comparable system specs to you so the problem would appear to be at your end. Btw, Morrowind isn't Gothic, I won't even attempt to compare them (but if I did I'd wet myself over Gothic's apology for an interface  !), and it is very much more CPU intensive - that would seem to be the weak point in your system. |
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Thu Jul 04, 2002 4:23 pm |
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ItBurn
Village Dweller
Joined: 04 Jul 2002
Posts: 14
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I run the game as fast as this guy on my 1ghz tbird with a gf3ti200 and 512mb or ram...
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You n'wah! |
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Thu Jul 04, 2002 4:41 pm |
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Loremaster
Village Leader
Joined: 31 Mar 2002
Posts: 88
Location: Hampshire, England |
I think there's some confusion here. The framerates quoted in the orginal post are absolutely fine for an offline game, any stuttering is in fact caused either by loading in of game areas (the coding of which may not have been optimised, I would be the first to admit) or some bottleneck in the player's system - it seems to be a problem for some but not for others which suggests its not a general game engine problem.
The main thing imo is not to confuse the issue of framerates in a multi-player game where significant packetloss/lag results with those in offline games where much lower framerates will cause no slowdown at all. |
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Thu Jul 04, 2002 4:57 pm |
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Llama
High Emperor
Joined: 11 Oct 2001
Posts: 509
Location: Earth |
quote:
I've played games with way better graphics(imo),
lol
Like what? |
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Thu Jul 04, 2002 5:02 pm |
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Fireteddy
City Guard
Joined: 24 May 2002
Posts: 148
Location: Windsor, Canada |
Mrph. The game is very playable at 10 FPS. FPS is for some reason seen as the end-all-be-all benchmark for performance, but it's not - this isn't Quake 3 where you need 60 frames a second to be able to play, it's not a racing game, it's an RPG where your walk speed is about the same as a glacier movement.
Maybe I have some sort of a 'magic computer', but my laptop - 1GHz, 256MB RAM, GeForce 2 - has never dipped below 15. Ever. Indoors I don't get 100, mind you - that's goddamn obscene, by the way, you're not one to complain, makes the rest of us look bad - but I do get a solid 30. I've enjoyed every one of the 60+ hours I sunk into the game.
-Matt stops now before this reply becomes a 500 word essay
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Fri Jul 05, 2002 2:49 am |
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The Hurricane
Tempered Warlord
Joined: 01 Jun 2002
Posts: 299
Location: The Sword Coast |
quote:
Originally posted by Llama
quote:
I've played games with way better graphics(imo),
lol
Like what?
Eh, I take that back...didn't mean to say that really. I was trying to say that I've played many games that look very good, maybe not as spiffy as Morrowind, with excellent performance on my cpu. Just wondering why Bethesda went all out with Morrowind (graphic wise) and bogged down the performance. Imo, Gothic and GTA3 look great and run fast on my computer with everything at max. In reality, Morrowind is better looking than those two but it runs slow on my computer...so I start to think...man this game doesn't look "that" much better than Gothic (even though Morrowind does have better graphics).... I guess there aren't too many games out there better looking than Morrowind. Sorry, must've been too late to be posting, didn't mean to make it sound like I'm hiding ultra-games that look 10x better than Morrowind and run at 200fps on my hard-drive.
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Fri Jul 05, 2002 3:14 am |
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The Hurricane
Tempered Warlord
Joined: 01 Jun 2002
Posts: 299
Location: The Sword Coast |
quote:
Mrph. The game is very playable at 10 FPS. FPS is for some reason seen as the end-all-be-all benchmark for performance, but it's not - this isn't Quake 3 where you need 60 frames a second to be able to play, it's not a racing game, it's an RPG where your walk speed is about the same as a glacier movement.
Yeah, I agree. I think most people complain about the fps because they don't stay constant. Indoors, which for me jumps between 60-100fps, runs smooth because a jump from 60-72fps dosn't really effect the game that much (at least for me it doesn't). However, if I go to Balmora my fps can jump from 5-30(without the optimizer) which causes the game to stutter. Now when I use the the optimizer to keep fps to 10 at all times. The game runs smooth like I was indoors....not as fast mind you...but the stuttering is gone. When the fps jump from 5-25-15-7-30, as they did in my pre-optimizer days, it causes a lot of stuttering....that's why I think people jump the gun and say the game sucks and runs horrible on their system. This game is definitely playable at 10fps.
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"Stand back...there's a hurricane coming through..." |
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Fri Jul 05, 2002 3:45 am |
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Mephisto
Leader of the Senate
Joined: 05 May 2002
Posts: 300
Location: Holland |
quote:
Originally posted by The Hurricane
quote:
Originally posted by Llama
quote:
I've played games with way better graphics(imo),
lol
Like what?
Eh, I take that back...didn't mean to say that really. I was trying to say that I've played many games that look very good, maybe not as spiffy as Morrowind, with excellent performance on my cpu. Just wondering why Bethesda went all out with Morrowind (graphic wise) and bogged down the performance. Imo, Gothic and GTA3 look great and run fast on my computer with everything at max. In reality, Morrowind is better looking than those two but it runs slow on my computer...so I start to think...man this game doesn't look "that" much better than Gothic (even though Morrowind does have better graphics).... I guess there aren't too many games out there better looking than Morrowind. Sorry, must've been too late to be posting, didn't mean to make it sound like I'm hiding ultra-games that look 10x better than Morrowind and run at 200fps on my hard-drive.
You have to understand that MW is ten times as advanced as agame like GTA3, where basically only a few things have to be calculated. They dont care about your clothes, your character isnt build with over 10 different areas, there are no faction dispositions. In short, 'simple' games like UT2003 and GTA3 will always run WAY faster than a similar, or in this case better, looking rpg. Thats also the reason why most rpgs looked disgusting until recently.
I myself couldnt care much less actually. Playing on p3 450/256mb/tnt2/win98SE with 1024/786 max view distance, max AI distance, no shadows. Yes, a constand 7 fps, but who cares? I need no reflexes, and with these gfx I can even better emerge myself in the world.
But for the OP:
Disable all background progs (firewall/vrius scanner)
Run a no-cd crack for safedics v2
Defragment HD
Use latest drivers
Try to disable sound hardware acceleration
Good luck, you should get 20fs with medium settings, solid 12 with max. |
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Fri Jul 05, 2002 7:56 am |
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Warmaster-Horus
Most Exalted Highlord
Joined: 28 Apr 2002
Posts: 421
Location: Eye of Terror, Washington |
I have a P4 with 512 megs of RAM and a Radeon 8500le and the NoCD crack. I get 30 frames everywhere and i run everything at max except view distance (Medium). The only problem i've ever had was the occasional memory leak crash to desktop and this weird little black square that won't go away unless i change the resolution back and forth.
It would kill the RIVA TNT 2 (Crappy Sony special edition) That came with my computer
And I get a steady 28 fps on JK2 and it looks perfect... I don't see why have 150 ps would really matter
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Fri Jul 05, 2002 8:03 am |
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