I'm not familiar with this game, but for DirectX 8, a Super Socket 7 machine is really not fast enough.

I'm thinking more of a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP for something like that. Should be very cheap to find parts, cheaper than decent SS7 gear.

Pretty sure morrowind used to have awful performance on my athlon 2000xp, vga was either mx440 ir fx5200.

I know is a really impossible task, but I just want to obtain the maximum form this rig.
There is not only Morrowind to play obviously, I can play Civilization II, ATF Gold, USAF, IAF, lots of DX7/8 titles with my beloved K6-III+.
I use Morrowind just for a challenge.

Some suggestions on my doubts would be really nice.

ratfink wrote:

Pretty sure morrowind used to have awful performance on my athlon 2000xp, vga was either mx440 ir fx5200.

What??
I used to play really nicely my first playtrough years ago on a P2B-F with a Pentium-III@1000Mhz and a Geforce MX440 (second with a Ti4200, much better AND DX8 effects).

Morrowind really needs a fast CPU and lots of RAM. Otherwise, it's 20fps at best outside.

For RAM I am covered, as you see I have 1gbyte.
For CPU, well, that's why I started this thread, to obtain tips on speeding up my K6.
20fps outdoor would be really nice to see.

Any suggestions about the issue with intro movie?
Does changing Audio card would Help?
I read about some strange behaviour with Live! cards and socket7, does the Audigy do the same?
Now I'm installing Win98SE and the USP3.43

Mamba wrote:

I am building a K6-III+ rig with some "modern" pieces just to obtain good performance on DX8 games like Morrowind, I know it's really challenging, maybe impossible, but I try anyway.

Sounds like a pretty big waste of time and effort... 😐

You will not achieve 20FPS outdoors with a K6-III+. Even a Pentium 4 at 3.2GHz will have a hard time maintaining a framerate upwards of 30-40 outdoors AFAIR. It depends on draw distance among other things, but Morrowind is an amazing CPU hog due to how unoptimised it is.

The intro movie is slow due to the CPU. I don't think there's any work around to that.

I'm not really sure any K6-III system is going to be up to the task of Morrowind even with a powerful video card. It's a CPU intensive game and a K6-III isn't enough CPU. I know the minimum specs say 500mhz CPU, but games rarely run smoothly on the minimum hardware spec. The official spec also says P-III, Celeron, or Athlon, so I don't think a 500mhz K6 class CPU is going to have enough FPU power. I know it didn't run well on my Compaq K6-2 533 system.

Morrowind is very inefficient. It doesn't cull unseen polygons, other than beyond the view distance clip plane. I've seen some comments that it may render back to front. I remember needing an Athlon 64 to really get it running fast finally and I guesstimate that is about 20x faster than a K6-3+.

On retrogaming, I always look at the recommended specs to run a game, and try to have a computer at least somewhat faster than these, if I want to play it smoothly on full details.

I understand people trying to be "period correct", which means having a low end 486 to play Doom for example, but if you have the choice, and the game plays well on newer hardware, and this hadrware is cheap, I think it's a bad choice to stay and be stuck at low framerates.

😀

For now I am having a lot of pain in the @ss trying to make work Win98SE with USP3...
Finally surfong the web is acceptable with Opera, KernelEX seems to be nearly useless (it crashes anyway).
The Audigy drivers has been another problem, they where really difficult to find and install.

Now it seems to be all ok.
I overclocked the K6-III+ to 633Mhz (115x5.5) but it was unstable, revert to 605.
Downloaded Rivatuner, I'll try to overclock the FX5900XT and then I'll launch 3dmark2001SE

Unfortunately, you won't see any performance increase by overclocking your FX card. The game is severely bottlenecked by the CPU at this point.

Before trying Morrowind, I'm realizing that in Win98SE +3.43 I got really WORSE performance than XP SP3 with the same configuration.
I installed the unofficial service pack 3.43 but it seems I only overcumbered the rig.

That is a little strange, I was thinking that win98 could be faster for K6.

Well maybe I was wrong... Or maybe I have to leave Win98SE SP1 unmodified to obtain a faster system.

XP is almost always faster than Win98 in CPU-bound situations. Well, unless you're using like a P120. 😁
You might want to try Win2000 as well. It sometimes benches slightly higher than XP, not that that's going to fix your Morrowind performance issues.
Still, I really like your setup. I've always been a fan of taking different platforms and completely maxing them out, and you've certainly done that with your K6-III!

Standard Def Steve wrote:

XP is almost always faster than Win98 in CPU-bound situations. Well, unless you're using like a P120. 😁
You might want to try Win2000 as well. It sometimes benches slightly higher than XP, not that that's going to fix your Morrowind performance issues.
Still, I really like your setup. I've always been a fan of taking different platforms and completely maxing them out, and you've certainly done that with your K6-III!

Thank you,
Yes I'll try Win2000 and see how it will perform.
Maybe it will be too slow for Morrowind, but I don't care. It will be a perfect rig for win98/DOS games.

Uhm...
Installed Win2000 with SP4.
I got abysmall performance with 3DMark2001 (2400 points.... 1000 points less than XP).
That's weird... Isn't win2000 supposed to be more fast?

I think I'll revert to XP SP3.

Someone at K6plus managed to hit 4000 points with the same 5900xt on a P5A and a K6-III@600Mhz.
Really don't know how...

The key was the driver version 52.16 under Windows98SE. DirectX Version can also be important.
My System gave me 3493 3dMarks.
K6-III+@550 MHz 100 MHz FSB
Tyan S1590 1MB cache
256 MB RAM
FX5900XT driver 52.16

Under Windows98:
Geforce3 gave me always higher framerates, specially in older OpenGL games like Kingpin and older direct3d games like Viper Racing.
Tomb Raider 2 was even to slow on the FX5900XT, in areas with lots of water framerate dropped below 20 fps.
GF3 Driver was here 12.90, 14.10

For older games (<directx8) a Geforce2 should be even faster than the GF3.

It was DonPedro AFAIK

Yes it was DonPedro.
I used the exact combination of drivers he used.

I obtained less then 3400 and with a fx5700 and XP on an MVP3G2 I get the same. I started the thread.
I don't understand...