NorsteinB wrote on 2026-08-10, 10:06:

Sure, Morrowind falls into that era, but for one it was not a demanding game at all, running even on a 500 MHz Pentium III or the earliest Athlons. Also as it is less of a fast-paced action game, it's not as bad to play at only 30 FPS.
But if you want to play UT2003 without getting eye cancer whenever you turn around or there are 3 or more other players on the screen, that SDR memory is going to hurt.

Morrowind was the only reason for me, to upgrade from a thunderbird 1200 SDR to an Athlon XP 1800+ DDR system back then. Which from the perspective of clock speed makes no sense, but the performance boost was enormous, especially for the low fps scenes. I'm planning to recreate that expierience by building a duron 1300 System on both platforms.

The Problem was not the CPU time, but the amount of data, which was handled by the game for it's time.

NorsteinB wrote on 2026-08-10, 10:06:

Sure, Morrowind falls into that era, but for one it was not a demanding game at all, running even on a 500 MHz Pentium III or the earliest Athlons. Also as it is less of a fast-paced action game, it's not as bad to play at only 30 FPS.

Woa... this is so far from what I experienced with the game.

I guess if you are building retro systems to run a 25 year old game like Morrowind with the graphics settings and draw distance turned all the way down while barely managing fluid frame rates in towns... then you might be able to run it on a PIII 500Mhz.

My experience was that several parts of the game (mainly cities) brought my Athlon Thunderbird 1.33Ghz + GF4 Ti 4400 system to its knees, and continued to do so with an Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino, as well as a 1700+ Thoroughbred overclocked to 2Ghz. It was better with an Athlon 64 3000+ (S939) with a 6800GT but the cities were still a slog at max view distance, and going to an X2 4200+ didn't really make a huge difference in the CPU limited parts either. By then Oblivion was out and using the same engine, with even more crippling CPU load in cities.

I think the first thing that really seemed like it made a huge difference to the smoothness of Morrowind in the slowest parts of the game was getting my Core 2 Duo E6750 and overclocking the snot out of it. By the time I had an i5 2500K pushed to 4.2Ghz it finally seemed to eliminate the CPU bottleneck enough to use mods to extend the view distance out even further without much performance penalty.

I had a freak hardware failure right before Morrowind came out (after having it preordered and spending a year or two on the forums with the devs while it was still a work in progress), which left me without the Tbird 1.33Ghz + Ti 4400 system mentioned above. So, on release day I had to start playing it on an Athlon SlotA 750Mhz with a Geforce2 GTS 32MB... it was playable, but was NOT a great experience!! Playing that game on a 500Mhz PIII and a matching GPU (TNT2? Geforce2 MX 200?) would have been awful.

There was a tool called FPS Optimizer, which helped al lot by dynamicaly reducing the view distance when the fps dropped. This worked well, since you don't need to long view distances in battles or in towns. I still ised it on the Athlon 1800+.

I first tried Morrowind with latest official patch, and I got around 25+ fps in cities at default settings, sometimes it dipped down to around 20fps. In wilderness it was better, 35+ fps and more than that indoors. This is with Athlon XP 2500+ at stock speed on KT133A, with 133MHz memory. So playable but not smooth by modern standards.

However, there's a fan made mesh optimization patch which significantly improved performance, fps stays at around 30 even in cities.

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45384

I think for a really fast 9x system the best card is the 7800 GTX and other cards on G70. 77.72 drivers are fairly stable with the shutdown patch on them and I haven't had a whole lot of issues. For better compatibility you might wanna look at the GeForce4 or GeForce FX series, though.