Perhaps your driver manually sets some filtering like FSAA? I used to have issues with some games when I specify such features in driver config. By the way, Morrowind at 1280x1024 8xFSAA and other options at max is not smooth on my E6300/HD5670

I did have 4xAA forced in the driver configuration, yes. Just now I disabled that, changed the screen res from 1280x960 to 800x600, disabled vsync and removed MGE. Still the same result: 15fps at minimum view distance, 10fps at max. 🙁

Is Morrowind OpenGL or Direct3D?

I believe it's Direct3D 8.

see if processor affinity helps
edit: it doesnt
ps: I'm only getting 40fps on a much faster pc I get twice that in oblivion

I know it wouldn't be period-accurate, but why not play it on a modern system? I don't think Morrowind has any issues with newer computers or operating systems, but I don't really know for sure. 🤣 From what I've heard though, Bethesda games are typically much more demanding than what their minimum requirements list, especially as soon as you start loading mods and stuff.

I will do some testing on my upgraded gaming rig, I have Morrowing GOTY and some lovely overhaul mods installed.

As for the reasoning behind having extra horsepower with Bethesday games, it's due to the Gamebryo engine, nice for mods but not very optimized 😉

Skyrim uses an updated Gamebryo like engine named the Creation Engine, still not quite optimized but supports higher res graphics and such without bogging down.

The CPU is somewhat of a bottleneck believe it or not. But you should be more in the 30s for frame rate.

Morrowind renders in an inefficient manner that wastes fillrate, and it is also extremely CPU dependent. A GF7800 shouldn't be any problem but this game eats CPU.

I believe you're might be using a broken driver. There were a lot of them for Win9x/2K/XP.

Do you have chipset drivers for your motherboard installed?

JIGGLE THE CORD!!!

Just tried running Morrowind on my gaming rig, seems to run just fine.

I'm using the FPS Optimizer so I can run at my native 1680 x 1050 desktop resolution.

I'm running on a Win 7 Pro, x64-bit machine with 8GB of ram and an 8-core AMD cpu.

I didn't even set the affinity for the game, just set the resolution and launched via FPS Optimizer.

swaaye wrote:

The CPU is somewhat of a bottleneck believe it or not. But you should be more in the 30s for frame rate.

I never used P4, but I do know that I played and finished Morrowind on athlon XP 1700+ witd DDR 266 and there was no stuttering even with Radeon 8500. It must be some kind of a bug or incompatibility. I'd just reinstall all drivers and DirectX from scratch. Try compatibility modes too.

elfuego wrote:

swaaye wrote:

The CPU is somewhat of a bottleneck believe it or not. But you should be more in the 30s for frame rate.

I never used P4, but I do know that I played and finished Morrowind on athlon XP 1700+ witd DDR 266 and there was no stuttering even with Radeon 8500. It must be some kind of a bug or incompatibility. I'd just reinstall all drivers and DirectX from scratch. Try compatibility modes too.

Same thing, Morrowind was playable back in the days on Celeron 1700 with Radeon 8500 and 1Gb RAM.

Davros wrote:

see if processor affinity helps
edit: it doesnt
ps: I'm only getting 40fps on a much faster pc I get twice that in oblivion

I tried that, disabled one core (actually half a core 🤣) in taskmgr. In my case the framerate didn't change at all, but loading saved games / new areas took about 10 times longer than usual. So no, didn't work.

filipetolhuizen wrote:

I believe you're might be using a broken driver. There were a lot of them for Win9x/2K/XP.

Which driver do you mean? For the graphics card? I have the latest nvidia driver installed, 306.81, so that can't be the problem.

Jorpho wrote:

Do you have chipset drivers for your motherboard installed?

Of course, but, I haven't updated them in years. So I just did that, aaaaaand.. nothing changed 🙁

luckybob wrote:

JIGGLE THE CORD!!!

Whoa, I just tried that and it actually.... no wait it didn't do anything 🙁

Then why not test an older driver for the Geforce. Maybe they killed something in the driver what this game needs or so. With some games I had problems too (glitches, return to desktop etc.) when I used a graphics card driver which was too new.

Try this
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.ph … .detail&id=2644

Which driver do you mean? For the graphics card? I have the latest nvidia driver installed, 306.81, so that can't be the problem.

That could be a problem. DX 8 or whatever version the game uses could be broken on these drivers. The 267.xx were the last good drivers set I've ever seen (assuming you're using Windows XP). I stopped upgrading them since they started breaking things. The best set of drivers for this card are from may, 2007 and the version number is 94.24. They were the most compatible ones. I would try them just to make sure nVidia hasn't screwed things up again. And stay away from any driver version with format 1xx.xx.

elfuego wrote:

swaaye wrote:

The CPU is somewhat of a bottleneck believe it or not. But you should be more in the 30s for frame rate.

I never used P4, but I do know that I played and finished Morrowind on athlon XP 1700+ witd DDR 266 and there was no stuttering even with Radeon 8500. It must be some kind of a bug or incompatibility. I'd just reinstall all drivers and DirectX from scratch. Try compatibility modes too.

How would I go about doing that, reinstalling DirectX? i don't think there's a way to uninstall it, all you can do is update it through the web installer thingy. I just did that by the way and it didn't help.

Alucard wrote:

Then why not test an older driver for the Geforce. Maybe they killed something in the driver what this game needs or so. With some games I had problems too (glitches, return to desktop etc.) when I used a graphics card driver which was too new.

I could try that, but that woukl mean I have to install the newer driver again to play other games.. that would be my last resort then if nothing else works. Although I do like the idea of having the classic control panel back 😀

Davros wrote:

Try this
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.ph … .detail&id=2644

That's a pretty radical solution, don't you think? At least MW used to run pretty well on this system so even if it may help I don't think that would solve the problem.