8500 + Athlon XP was more like the minimum I would ever want to play the game on. The reality was the game needed more powerful hardware than was available. Geforce FX and Radeon 9700 are much more pleasant, especially if you want to play at more than 1024x768.

I also had bizarre problems with 8500. It has compatibility problems with some KT266A and KT333 boards. In Morrowind the UI would become progressively less responsive to clicks. Unreal 2's robot planet was unplayable. It was unpredictable like that.

As for reinstalling DirectX
http://dxbuster.wummy.org/index_e.html

As I mentioned before im only getting 40(ish) fps on a q6600 and a 6950 @1680x1050:(

So, I just removed DX9, that took quite a while. With vanilla DX8.1b I tried MW again... nothing changed. And after reinstalling DX9... nothing changed.

This is driving me mad. I used to play this game on this same system, with an even slower P4, less RAM, and a Radeon 9800. That wasn't very fast but I don't remember it running this slow either.

jwt27 wrote:

So, I just removed DX9, that took quite a while.

How did you manage that? You are correct in that there is no easy way to manage it.

What OS are you running, anyway? XP? Does everything else run smoothy? Do you have a sufficiently large swapfile? Maye give it a kick with PageDefrag ?

I linked the easy way to uninstall DirectX above. DirectX Buster came in handy when I was having problems with Homeworld and discovered that DX9+NV has some serious problems on 9x.

I used the .bat file in the link swaaye posted, what it does is extract the DX8 files from the XP cd (finding that CD took most of the time 🤣), then install them in safe mode. DXDIAG confirmed I was on 8.1b.

And yes, this system runs XP. Most other programs and games run fine on this system. Even Skyrim is quite playable (10-30fps outdoors, 20-60fps indoors). I have this Puran defrag program that defrags the swap file and registry on every boot, so that should be OK. Somehow even a fixed size swap file manages to fragment itself once in a while.

One thing I havent tried yet is reinstalling morrowind. Can't imagine a game would slow down if left to rot on a harddrive for several years, but then, it IS a Bethesda game. Now if only I could find the CDs...

Just to add to the chorus, I got a comparable framerate with a P3 1.4GHz Tualatin and a Geforce2 MX (lower res though).. something is definitely wrong.
As a more relevant comparison for your system, I ran the game for 1-2 years with an Athlon XP 3000+ and Radeon 9800 Pro at 1280x1024, and it was very smooth (no MGE). I don't think I ever measured the frame rate but it was pleasant.

My main suggestion would be to dramatically downgrade the video driver to something closer to Morrowind's time period. Even if you have to upgrade it again, at least you'll have an idea of where the problem lies.
I'm not sure it's that important to have the latest drivers anyway. I've never kept up with video drivers myself and it hardly seems to matter. I'm sure it's different for everybody though, depending on the particular card and what games the person is playing.

For whatever it's worth, my desktop uses a GTX260 with driver version 260.99, and DX9.0c on XP 32bit. It runs modded MGE Morrowind fine (it's a newer CPU though). I don't know if that's a particularly good driver, it's just what I happen to have. If I were having the strange framerate problem you're seeing, I'd probably try something much older from when nVidia was still paying attention to DX8.

Something else I just remembered - believe it or not, there is more than one version of DirectX 9.0c. Microsoft forgot what version numbers are for. When I was setting up MGE I had to update my 9.0c to a "newer" 9.0c to make it work correctly. But the problem I had wasn't slowness, it just refused to run.

I wonder if something in the Morrowind configuration could have somehow been messed up which is making it slow. There's settings in Morrowind.ini for example which maybe could do that.
If you can't find anything, I suppose reinstalling the game wouldn't hurt, and try running it completely unmodified before adding mods/MGE back.

Try compatibility mode! It cant hurt and it takes only a few seconds of your testing time. Its a shot in the dark, but who knows?

Another update, and likely the last one:

I installed an older version of the nVidia drivers, 196.21, that was the oldest I could find on my pc. That slightly improved the framerate, by about 5fps. Still not much but a bit better. However I lost all settings for individual programs in the driver configuration, and suddenly I was unable to select any resolution below 1280x960 in DX games.

Then I found the MW cds again and reinstalled the game, with the exact same version, exact same mods, exact same no-cd crack, exact same MGE, fps optimizer and everything... AND THAT DID IT 😳
Framerates improved to about 30-40 outdoors but indoors went down to 43 max. After reinstalling the latest nvidia drivers everything went back to normal, and now indoors fps varies between about 80-125(vsync limit) and outdoors its about 30-60. Outside towns it's even higher.

So, I'm off to play morrowind right now 😀

The simplest solution, as usual 😀
Good luck in Vvanderfell! Don't get bitten by an ash monster or something 😀

Could this have been a bjorked .ini file for Morrowind all along ?

I'm thinking so as this would be replaced when reinstalling the game.

After actually finishing Arena and Daggerfall for the first time in the last year or two, I've been wanting to progress to Morrowind (I own all 5 games in the main TES series but never managed to finish any of them before, and I'm OCD about playing through a series without skipping ahead), but unlike most 2D games its graphics haven't aged well (especially character models & animation).

They've got that great overhaul mod, but it brings my poor 5-year old laptop (Dell M1730, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz, nVidia 8700M GT SLI, 4GB RAM, Vista 32-bit / Linux Mint x64 dual-boot) to its knees. I don't want to play on my more powerful desktop (Core i7 860 o/c'd to 4.2GHz, AMD Radeon HD 5870, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 x64) because I've already got a long line of games to finish on there (New Vegas, Dragon Age 1, then maybe Bioshock 1 / Deus Ex: HR / Batman: AA / Total War: Shogun 2 / etc.).

I wonder if it would run any better in Linux under Wine, or if that would just add another layer of problems?

HunterZ wrote:

I wonder if it would run any better in Linux under Wine, or if that would just add another layer of problems?

I can't say I have tried this out, I own both the GOTY on disc and the Steam version of Morrorwind, of course that is running under Win 7 on my gaming rig.

I can say however that it does run great on a current dedicated machine for gaming.

Yeah, it runs fine on my gaming desktop, but as I said I've already got too many newer epic RPGs to play on there.

BigBodZod wrote:

Could this have been a bjorked .ini file for Morrowind all along ?

I'm thinking so as this would be replaced when reinstalling the game.

That must have been the problem then I guess. I did look through the ini file but couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. I usually put a lot of exclamation marks around settings I change, so I would have noticed.

HunterZ wrote:

After actually finishing Arena and Daggerfall for the first time in the last year or two, I've been wanting to progress to Morrowind (I own all 5 games in the main TES series but never managed to finish any of them before, and I'm OCD about playing through a series without skipping ahead), but unlike most 2D games its graphics haven't aged well (especially character models & animation).

They've got that great overhaul mod, but it brings my poor 5-year old laptop (Dell M1730, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz, nVidia 8700M GT SLI, 4GB RAM, Vista 32-bit / Linux Mint x64 dual-boot) to its knees. I don't want to play on my more powerful desktop (Core i7 860 o/c'd to 4.2GHz, AMD Radeon HD 5870, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 x64) because I've already got a long line of games to finish on there (New Vegas, Dragon Age 1, then maybe Bioshock 1 / Deus Ex: HR / Batman: AA / Total War: Shogun 2 / etc.).

I wonder if it would run any better in Linux under Wine, or if that would just add another layer of problems?

My experience with wine is that Diablo 2 runs OK. Not much else. I remember from a few years ago when I used wine on a daily basis, they had an update once in a while and a massive list of changes that made it look like a huge improvement over the previous version. But after installing the new version still nothing else than Diablo would run on it. I noticed Flash updates do the same thing now, except on every update they list the same changelog 🤣

As for your problem, if I were you I'd ditch the graphics mod, the game's fine as it is 😀

Yeah I should probably go back to trying vanilla Morrowind on the laptop. Part of the problem is that Morrowind FPS Optimizer doesn't work so well in Vista, but MGE does; unfortunately MGE brings in other baggage that tends to slow the game down.

You can disable all that other stuff, I only use MGE for the fps counter, FOV and AA setting and it's not slowing anything down.
What exactly doesn't work about the FPS optimizer? A friend of mine uses it on Win7 and as far as I know it runs OK.

It's been too long since I last fiddled with it, but I remember something about it not working for me.

jwt27 wrote:

My experience with wine is that Diablo 2 runs OK. Not much else.

Don't give up on wine so fast 😀 I played a bunch of games on wine, even the modern ones usually work satisfactory. Just make sure you get the right DX-components and it will (usually) work just fine. 😉

Wine is great for playing Win95 games that aren't happy on Vista/7 and/or modern GPU drivers. It can be pretty finicky though, so I try to use it as a last resort.