Generally when you have a low end machine you try to squeeze every ounce of blood out of it's hardware with software tweaks. Morrowind can be heavily tweaked for performance and image quality through it's configuration file, Morrowind.ini. I have a low end machine, but even if you have a high end machine you can still benefit from this tweak guide. Every cpu cycle you can squeeze will make your Morrowind experience smoother, richer and more stable. Generally I post this in individual threads when needed, but I thought that everyone should at least expirement with this to see if any benefits are drawn from it. (it seemed to have helped those that I presented the guide to in the past)

First you need to locate your Morrowind.ini. It's in the root Morrowind folder (example: "C:\Program Files\Morrowind\". For basic users just right click your Morrowind start menu/desktop shortcut and selcet properties. Open the "Shortcut" tab and press the "Find Shortcut" button. Here you will find your Morrowind.ini. It's the yelllow & white text file.

Now you need to backup the ini (just in case). Copy it somewhere you'll remember. Now double click to open (the origonal ini file). Now follow my instructions below by replacing current values with the recommended ones.

Feel free to comment, praise, critsize(constructively), or add/correct my settings.


Color Version (For Red, Green and Grey Forum colors)

IC3's Morroind.ini Tweak Guide - Part I (Performance)

Done on the followng machine specs;

-900 MHz Celeron w/SSE
-256 MB 133 MHz SDRAM
-BFG 256 MB Geforce 6200 PCI
-Soundblaster 16 PCI a.k.a. Ensoniq 5880 w/32 channel hardware DSound3D
-Windows Millenium Edition & Windows 2000 Professional
-7200 rpm HDD
-ATA-100 Controller

I got a tolerable frame rate with these tweaks on my lousy system (24 fps in Balmora), so for sure they must help out slightly better PCs.

NOTE: Before you complain about no framerate difference being seen I shall and will assume your Operating System has all useless background services and start-up items off or disabled.


[General]
Show FPS=0 ~Setting this to 1 will result in seeing the current frame rate at the bottom right of your screen while runnig Morrowind.

Max FPS=240 ~This is the max amount of frames per second that Morrowind will attempt to render. It's recommended that you set this to either 20 (consistant FPS), 30 (good FPS) or 60 (smooth FPS). Anything higher than 60 would be a waste of CPU and GPU resources as the human eye will barely notice the difference in frame rate.

TryArchiveFirst=0 ~If you don't have any mods installed set this to 1 as it will make Morrowind use only the default data in the Morrowind.bsa. 1 will result in the best performance. Set it to 0 if you use mods and set it to -1 if you are trying to make a Morrowind Total Conversion mod.

SkipProgramFlows=0 ~Set this to 1 to gain a slight performance boost

DontThreadLoad=1 ~Set this to 1 to not load cells (game areas) in multiple process threads. Setting it to 1 will increase performance at the cost of longer loading times.
NOTE: May cause sound problems on some cards and/or systems . I've had this issue with my SB Ensoniq 5880 (SB16). Adjusting PCI latency settings or toggling threadloading can remedy this issue. If you choose to have threadloading off it is best to disable multithread DX calls in Timeslip's MGE.

ThreadPriority=-1 ~Just set this to 1. When using thread loading setting this to 1 will result in a performance boost.

ThreadSleepTime=4 ~Do not modify this.

Clip One To One Float=1 ~Do not modify this.

Flip Control Y=0 ~Setting this to 1 will result in the mouse looking down while looking up. Inversed mouse looking basically.

SkipKFExtraction=1 ~Do not modify this.

PC Footstep Volume=0.7 ~Determines the max volume of Player footsteps sound effects.

Disable Audio=0 ~Set to 1 to gain a slight performance boost at the cost of no sound.

Background Keyboard=0 ~set this to 1 if you are using a hot key application in the background.

Use Joystick=0 ~Set this to 1 if you are using a joystick.

Joystick X Turns=0 ~Set this to 1 to eliminate side strafing.

~These joystick settings determine which stick and axis is used for a particular movement in Morrowind.

; X=1, Y = 2, Z = 3, XRot = 4, YRot = 5, ZRot = 6
Joystick Look Up/Down=6
Joystick Look Left/Right=3

Create Maps Enable=0 ~Do not modify this.

Screen Shot Enable=0 ~Set this to 1 to enable screenshots in Morrowind. If you use MGE it's recommended that this be left at 0 and you disable locakable backbuffers.

Screen Shot Base Name=Morrowind ScreenShot ~Do not modify this.

Screen Shot Index=0 ~Do not modify this.

Beta Comment File= ~Do not modify this.

Interior Cell Buffer=10 ~Set this to 1 for best performance while using Thread Loading.

Exterior Cell Buffer=32 ~Set this to 4 for best performance while using Thread Loading.

Number of Shadows=6 ~Place a cap on the maximum number of shadows Morrowind will render.

Maximum Shadows Per Object=1 ~It's supposed to allow more than 1 shadow per object, but it seems to be a broken feature. Leave this at 1.

MaintainImportedDialogueOrder=0 ~Do not modify this.

ExportDialogueWithHyperlinks=0 ~Do not modify this.

UseExistingTempFile=0 ~Set this to 1 for a slight performance boost, I have a faint idea of what it does.

CanMoveInfosWhileFiltered=0 ~Set this to 1 for a slight performance boost. I have no idea what it really does.

Editor Starting Cell=Moonmoth Legion Fort, Prison Towers ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Pos=-112.749161,477.272614,-34.998627 ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Dir 0=0.917121,-0.395613,-0.048786 ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Dir 1=0.398609,0.910227,0.112248 ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Dir 2=0.000000,-0.122392,0.992483 ~Do not modify this.

Subtitles=0 ~Set to 1 to see subtitles of NPCs speaking. Set to 0 for a slight performance boost.

ShowHitFader=1 ~Set to 1 to see the red "blood shadow" when recieving physical damage in Morrowind combat. Set to 0 for a performance boost. To completly disable it you must disable lockable backbuffers in MGE 3 GUI

Werewolf FOV=100 ~Do not modify this. Unless you like a different field of vision.

[LightAttenuation]
UseConstant=0 ~Do not modify this.

ConstantValue=0.0 ~Do not modify this.

UseLinear=1 ~Set this to 0 then read ahead.

LinearMethod=1 ~Do not modify this.

LinearValue=3.0 ~Do not modify this.

LinearRadiusMult=1.0 ~Do not modify this.

UseQuadratic=0 ~Set this to 1 to use quad lighting which is faster and more 'alive' than linear lighting.

QuadraticMethod=2 ~Do not modify this.

QuadraticValue=16.0 ~Set this to 3.0 for best results.

QuadraticRadiusMult=1.0 ~Set this to 2.0 for best results.

OutQuadInLin=0 ~Do not modify this.



IC3's Morroind.ini Tweak Guide - Part II (Image Quality)

Coming Soon..



IC3's Morroind.ini Tweak Guide - Part III (Modding)

Coming soon in a post edit near you!







Normal Version (For Blue and Tan Forum colors)

IC3's Morroind.ini Tweak Guide - Part I (Performance)

Done on the followng machine specs;

-900 MHz Celeron w/SSE
-256 MB 133 MHz SDRAM
-BFG 256 MB Geforce 6200 PCI
-Soundblaster 16 PCI a.k.a. Ensoniq 5880 w/32 channel hardware DSound3D
-Windows Millenium Edition & Windows 2000 Professional
-7200 rpm HDD
-ATA-100 Controller

I got a tolerable frame rate with these tweaks on my lousy system (24 fps in Balmora), so for sure they must help out slightly better PCs.

NOTE: Before you complain about no framerate difference being seen I shall and will assume your Operating System has all useless background services and start-up items off or disabled.


[General]
Show FPS=0 ~Setting this to 1 will result in seeing the current frame rate at the bottom right of your screen while runnig Morrowind.

Max FPS=240 ~This is the max amount of frames per second that Morrowind will attempt to render. It's recommended that you set this to either 20 (consistant FPS), 30 (good FPS) or 60 (smooth FPS). Anything higher than 60 would be a waste of CPU and GPU resources as the human eye will barely notice the difference in frame rate.

TryArchiveFirst=0 ~If you don't have any mods installed set this to 1 as it will make Morrowind use only the default data in the Morrowind.bsa. 1 will result in the best performance. Set it to 0 if you use mods and set it to -1 if you are trying to make a Morrowind Total Conversion mod.

SkipProgramFlows=0 ~Set this to 1 to gain a slight performance boost

DontThreadLoad=1 ~Set this to 1 to not load cells (game areas) in multiple process threads. Setting it to 1 will increase performance at the cost of longer loading times.
NOTE: May cause sound problems on some cards and/or systems . I've had this issue with my SB Ensoniq 5880 (SB16). Adjusting PCI latency settings or toggling threadloading can remedy this issue. If you choose to have threadloading off it is best to disable multithread DX calls in Timeslip's MGE.

ThreadPriority=-1 ~Just set this to 1. When using thread loading setting this to 1 will result in a performance boost.
ThreadSleepTime=4 ~Do not modify this.

Clip One To One Float=1 ~Do not modify this.

Flip Control Y=0 ~Setting this to 1 will result in the mouse looking down while looking up. Inversed mouse looking basically.

SkipKFExtraction=1 ~Do not modify this.

PC Footstep Volume=0.7 ]~Determines the max volume of Player footsteps sound effects.

Disable Audio=0 ~Set to 1 to gain a slight performance boost at the cost of no sound.

Background Keyboard=0 ~set this to 1 if you are using a hot key application in the background.

Use Joystick=0 ~Set this to 1 if you are using a joystick.

Joystick X Turns=0 ~Set this to 1 to eliminate side strafing.

~These joystick settings determine which stick and axis is used for a particular movement in Morrowind.

; X=1, Y = 2, Z = 3, XRot = 4, YRot = 5, ZRot = 6
Joystick Look Up/Down=6
Joystick Look Left/Right=3

Create Maps Enable=0 ~Do not modify this.

Screen Shot Enable=0 ~Set this to 1 to enable screenshots in Morrowind. If you use MGE it's recommended that this be left at 0 and you disable locakable backbuffers.

Screen Shot Base Name=Morrowind ScreenShot ~Do not modify this.

Screen Shot Index=0 ~Do not modify this.

Beta Comment File= ~Do not modify this.

Interior Cell Buffer=10 ~Set this to 1 for best performance while using Thread Loading.

Exterior Cell Buffer=32 ~Set this to 4 for best performance while using Thread Loading.

Number of Shadows=6 ~Place a cap on the maximum number of shadows Morrowind will render.

Maximum Shadows Per Object=1 ~It's supposed to allow more than 1 shadow per object, but it seems to be a broken feature. Leave this at 1.

MaintainImportedDialogueOrder=0 ~Do not modify this.

ExportDialogueWithHyperlinks=0 ~Do not modify this.

UseExistingTempFile=0 ~Set this to 1 for a slight performance boost, I have a faint idea of what it does.

CanMoveInfosWhileFiltered=0 ~Set this to 1 for a slight performance boost. I have no idea what it really does.

Editor Starting Cell=Moonmoth Legion Fort, Prison Towers ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Pos=-112.749161,477.272614,-34.998627 ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Dir 0=0.917121,-0.395613,-0.048786 ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Dir 1=0.398609,0.910227,0.112248 ~Do not modify this.

Editor Starting Dir 2=0.000000,-0.122392,0.992483 ~Do not modify this.

Subtitles=0 ~Set to 1 to see subtitles of NPCs speaking. Set to 0 for a slight performance boost.

ShowHitFader=1 ~Set to 1 to see the red "blood shadow" when recieving physical damage in Morrowind combat. Set to 0 for a performance boost. To completly disable it you must disable lockable backbuffers in MGE 3 GUI

Werewolf FOV=100 ~Do not modify this. Unless you like a different field of vision.

[LightAttenuation]
UseConstant=0 ~Do not modify this.

ConstantValue=0.0 ~Do not modify this.

UseLinear=1 ~Set this to 0 then read ahead.

LinearMethod=1 ~Do not modify this.

LinearValue=3.0 ~Do not modify this.

LinearRadiusMult=1.0 ~Do not modify this.

UseQuadratic=0 ~Set this to 1 to use quad lighting which is faster and more 'alive' than linear lighting.

QuadraticMethod=2 ~Do not modify this.

QuadraticValue=16.0 ~Set this to 3.0 for best results.

QuadraticRadiusMult=1.0 ~Set this to 2.0 for best results.

OutQuadInLin=0 ~Do not modify this.



IC3's Morroind.ini Tweak Guide - Part II (Image Quality)

Coming Soon..



IC3's Morroind.ini Tweak Guide - Part III (Modding)

Coming soon in a post edit near you!

I can't see anything. The colors are too bright, please choose something darker.

Scroll down the original post, I added a plain text version.

BTW - the color one looks like fine with the Blue Forum Color on both of the computers I use. Those that can't see it are either colorblind, or their monitor is not the best quality, I suppose.

At any rate, this is a good guide. Bookmarked.

A few comments: The Cell Buffers should be left at defaults unless you're running on a very limited memory computer (<= 128 MB on WinME or <= 256 MB on Windows 2000/XP). If you have more memory (1 GB or more), you can increase these values, but do not set them too high. Though I'm not sure what the actual numbers mean (number of cells? amount of memory set aside?), the purpose for the cell buffers is to improve overall performance - when re-entering cells you've already visited the last time you loaded a save game, it doesn't have to load them from the disk again if they're already in memory. I personally use 5 and 42 with good results; YMMV of course.

Also, the DontThreadLoad option is provided for troubleshooting only IMHO - by setting this to 1, I actually get much lower overall performance on my computer. The general rule of thumb is, while crossing cell boundaries (exterior cells), if you notice stuttering or a drop in frame rate, then you can benefit from setting it to 1; otherwise, leave it at 0. It prevents disk access from occurring unless the game is paused (presenting the Loading bar).

The rest looks good to me.

EDIT- let me re-write that (i'm about to pass out, need sleep see)

With thread loading with low buffers it makes crossing cells laggy, but after the loading is complete (a load of 1-4 buffer which is pretty small and quick) the framerate is smooth until you cross another cell, wait the 3-9 second load time and run around smooth some more. I had Balmora at 19-21 FPS on my 900 mhz celeron machine standing at the silt strider facing the Mages Guild on 1024x768, no shadows, with 8X Anisotropic and 80% view/AI distance.

The way I see it, use less memory for loading cells and use more memory for processor time and other things in cells. Why have a cell loaded that you aren't playing in?

EDIT 2: I should also mention that UDMA is a must for the quickest hard disk access times.

EDIT 3: just try out the settings, and tell me what difference you see.

Is your tweak unchanged from the one on your website (I've already got your URL parked in my copy/paste list)?

Sí, se cambia mucho.

Are you going to make me call my daughter for a translation???

Edit: Nevermind, Babelfish came through. Okay, swapped out the other link for this one. Thank you much IC3.

Sooo... how the tweaks work out for you, Yasgur? Any improvement?

BTW, later tonight maybe around 12am I'll post the image quality part of the tweak guide.

Well, in case it wasn't clear, I don't have an older computer that I can try this on. I have a strong opinion that I only need to tweak something if using the default settings are too distracting to me. I'm content with the defaults in Morrowind (which are mostly the best quality settings), so I have no real reason to try these tweaks. But looking at the tweaks you have presented, they look like they would improve performance on older hardware. And the fact that you're actually using them validates them.

And Yasgur's computer is faster than mine - I'm not sure he'd be inclined to try them, either.

I do have one suggestion, however. For those with Bloodmoon installed, show tweaks relating to the Blizzard and Snow weather patterns (reducing Max Snowflakes, etc.).

Also - how about a comment from Yacoby? (He wrote an INI tweak guide, too.)

Well, why not make your already fast PC perform faster? You could push the envelope a little more and just get an overall better and smoother gaming experience.



That will be posted in the image tweaks (part II of the guide).



Sure, I'm open to everyone's opinions.

Well, I tried out everything from this tweak guide and believe it or not I lost 2-3 frames per second. Now, I *think* what did that was either a] that quad lighting tweak, or b] the cell buffer settings. I also noticed the quad lighting settings were a bit extreme as far as the visual effect they had, everything was just way to green with that setting. A bit tamer config I've used in the past is this-
UseQuadratic=1

QuadraticMethod=2

QuadraticValue=1.5

QuadraticRadiusMult=0.5

However, this is just the settings I've had good performance with, obviously every pc config is different so those may not be good for you. Other than that I really like the tweak guide, definitely a must for slower pc's!!

I really have no desire to tweak anything IC3, as nightmare suggested. From a fresh start I get around 55 in Balmora using FPS Optimizer's 2x setting and I don't see many crashes. But I do want to post a link to your tweaks for other's to use, along with Yacoby's. So I'll be watching this to see how folks do.

IC3 - Based on new information presented in this post/thread, I would put a note in there about potential sound problems introduced by setting DontThreadLoad to 1.

Hmm, I never had sound issues with don't thread load on. I did notice, however, my game crashes a lot more with don't thread load off. Just thought I'd share that.

updated

Thanks for looking into these issues and finding solutions. I'll be sure to credit you guys for your input with the final draft (the final will be posted on a website).

EDIT: I've updated the test rig's specs too.

Here is info about the Light Attenuation section (thanks to Jeoshua): http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...p;#entry9046595

These should be set to:



That way, the local cell and all cells surrounding it, plus the last visited interior cell, are loaded into the cache and NOTHING MORE. Most people notice a slowdown after playing the game for a few hours, and setting these values too high is most definitely the cause in 90% of cases, I'd estimate! The 1 and 4 values you have listed are good, but maybe a bit too low. Plus, in Oblivion, only odd numbered cache sizes are allowed. I don't know if this is the case with Morrowind, but it IS made by the same company on the same basic engine (only an older version)... so I'd imagine the rules are the same even if it's not stated explicitly anywhere.

edit: You noticed my lighting research, awwh how sweet

Actually I can prove that this is a cell buffer counting the number of cells. Type "ssg" into the console. A window will pop up behind your morrowind game. If you can alt-tab out of morrowind (we all know it doesn't always like to do this) you will be shown the Morrowind Scene Graph. It shows all objects cells cameras lights and all that stuff loaded into the game.

Heres mine

As you can see, it exactly corresponds to the values I have set in my morrowind.ini file.

The problem with having these values set to a high number is that you are not IN these cells, yet they are fully loaded into the game. If you use thread loading, all these extra cells are unneeded at the time, as they are loaded into memory as they are needed. Really, in the exterior having 9 cells is quite enough as you have the one you're in and all those surrounding you.

I'd also like to point out that IC3 noticed that when using his recommended settings of 1,4 he experienced lag when changing cells, as the computer loaded cells into memory. with 1,9 (which I have changed to 3,9 since), I experience absolutely no lag of that kind, other than the normal skips when crossing cell boundaries as the game figures out which cells to display.

edit: Derp! oops

Thank you for that. I was never quite sure.


Given this information, I have also changed mine from the defaults (10,32) to the values you're using (3,9). I will give this a shot and let you know.


No, the DontThreadLoad setting has a default of 0. You're thinking of ThreadPriority, which does have a default of -1.


Thanks for that - I made that change as well, and I'll let you know how that goes.

I can not tell any difference between having my values set at 1,9 to 32,264. It just doesn't seem to make much difference if any.

The only change you'll notice is after a few hours of gameplay. Many people have slowdowns after >2 hours of play, once those large amounts of cells have been loaded. Setting these values to the ones I suggested won't give an immediate FPS boost, but it will make the game a bit more stable in long game sessions.

So, if setting the values lower doesn't make a difference, why would you need to load 264 cells at once anyways?! That's almost half the island at once!

Well, I have been droping them down. Some of the tweak guides tell you to increase them, since I have 2GB of RAM I had them very high. It did not do much. Now, I have read your latest postings and reset them to 1,9 and as I said, there just is no difference - so, there is no need to use large values. I do wish I could get rid of the pause at cell boundries - I think my old AMD 2600 is showing its age.

What settings should you alter to make the colors less dull? I already changed the colors of my computer settings and it did little difference, if any. I just want to make the colors stand out more.

Sorry, didn't read the question completly. I am not sure what you need to do. Are you using the stock textures? Or are you using a World Texture replacement?

Visual pack XT. It's not really that different from the default textures.

I've seen sone RGB settings in the ini file, but not sure which i should change and how.

I'm using the MVPs also. As far as I remember, the RGB values in the ini file are not for the general display, they control menu colors and such. If you need brighter colors, the only way I know is to use your moniter and/or display card adjustments.

Actually, it seems i dodn't change anything under the computer settings. Any change i make in the catalyst control center is reset to defaults once i go ingame. There IS a setting for "fullscreen 3D", but apparently, CCC doesn't consider morrowind fulscreen 3D. Not to mention since i reinstalled windows (because of catalyst) the color/brightness settings has dissapeared from the display control panel.

I really love catalyst and how it seems designed to make my life hell.

I have no idea about ATI cards, I have had Nvidia cards for 6 or 7 years now. If it is resetting, then there is something wrong and I hope someone can help you on that one.

Is there at least some setting to make the fog less thick?
I think there IS an ini in setting for color intensity, because in one of the .ini files downloads on PES, in the description i read something like "you should also check the more colorful morrowind .ini tweak" or something of the sort. Cept i can't find it with PES broken search engine.

In the ini there are a number of sections for different weathers. they do contain RGB color info. In Darker Morrowind, a new ini file is used that contains some new colors and such to produce the effect they wanted. I have not heard of a more colorful ini tweak as such. I will look about and see what I can come up with.

While searching for some unrelated ini tweak on google, i came across this:
Multiple french sites claim that changing interior and exterior cell buffer to 0 will reduce, if not get rid of, CTDs.

I can't say since i've yet to have a CTD, but those that do might try.

edit: they also talk about specific fps settings. Min 15 and max 85.
link to one of those pages:
http://perso.orange.fr/surf-morrowind-ping/trucastu.htm


text for those who read french:
Plus de retour sous Windows

Beaucoup de joueurs se plaignent de retours sous Windows lorsqu'ils jouent à Morrowind. Pour palier à ce problème, ouvrez le fichier Morrowind.ini avec un éditeur de texte (tel que le notepad) et modifiez-le comme ceci (il est conseillé de faire une copie de sauvegarde au préalable) :

Min FPS=15

MaX FPS=85

interior Cell Buffer=0

Exterior Cell Buffer=0

Désormais, vous pourrez jouer de longues heures sans vous arrêter.

Really? There is a Min FPS option?! This requires some testing since my baseline fps is 15 with my rig...

As i said, don't quote me on that...i might give it a try once the game starts to CTD, but other than that it's just something random i found.

This will probably be of interest to those playing with low view distance settings, i changed the following values:
Land Fog Day Depth=.69
Land Fog Night Depth=.69

into .50 each.

Note that there's one of those for EACH weather, sunny, rainy etc. I changed all those in a simmilar way, around -0.3 for each, so the values that were at 1.0 i put at .70

Those are related to fog thickness, i lowered it and i must say, the game looks a whole lot better now. I am sure berth didn't have lower view distances in mind when they adjusted these settings, give it a try and see if you like it. I even find it pretty good looking on high settings, but those that run the game on high settings also run IVD anyway . Your mileage may vary.

I'm sure plenty of people know this, but for those that don't, now you do.

Personally, I went through the weather portion of the ini files and set the sky and fogging colors to the same thing. Now, the skies blend in with the ground more realistically and the land in the distance looks alot better.

It also makes the land look a bit "colder" if I do say so myself, but less volcanic. So you may like sky colored fog, or you may not.

I think it would look great with IVD enabled, but I must wait for a while to confirm that (stupid MX4400 video card)

Jeoshua, if you want, post your ini and I'll take some screenshots. It won't be as good as the real thing, but it will give you an idea.

Nah, it'll only make me pine all the more

An update. The cell buffer settings didn't do any good for me. At 3 and 9, it made the Loading bar come up much more frequently (though it didn't last for more than a second or two each time). I changed that to 3 and 12, which helped a bit with that. But overall, it didn't help with my CTD's. I ended up putting it back to 10 and 32, which works fine for me.

As for the MGE CPU Idle option - I left it checked and set to 0. I see this as a good thing, so I'll leave it unless it causes a problem. YMMV, of course.

...Neat.

This actually helped. My game runs a whee bit faster now!
You have my thanks.



...Actually I might have a contribution.
If you're like me, and run Morrowind on a slower machine, you might notice that your system will chug it's way along during a storm, foggy weather, or worst of all... A blizzard.
Well, I have a small fix for that.

Find the [Weather Clear] option in your file and then copy the ONLY the stats for it.
Now find the rest of the options, [Weather Cloudy], [Weather Foggy], [Weather Overcast], [Weather Rain], [Weather Thunderstorm], [Weather Ashstorm], [Weather Blight], [Weather Snow], [Weather Blizzard]...
And copy over the stats and replace the stats with the [Weather Clear] stats.

Yes, this WILL basically get rid of the weather effects and make it look weird since there's only one weather pattern, but I've found it helps A LOT!

Note: This shouldn't have any negetive side-effects, so it's relativly safe. I've played for a while with these options and it doesn't crash.

Personally I would only copy those for the Snow and Blizzard types, since those drain the FPS the most. Or, if you want, lower the MaxSnowFlakes in those patterns to make it ease up a bit.

The other weather patterns, REALLY hurt my system...

Ever since I started using the modded .ini with the copied over weather stats, I've had no problems at all. I used to get A LOT of crashes during the weather patterns, Snow and Fog especially did that A LOT. I've never had a crash during a Rain/Thunderstorm, but it DOES cause my system to chug. Not to mention scare the crap out of me.

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption for Morrowind, given that the defaults are 10 and 32 (both even numbers).

Also, on faster systems I think it is sometimes better to set these numbers to values at least as high as their defaults; at least, I have tried out both high and low values and I've stuck with the high. I have not experienced the slow-downs, even with values of 32, 64 and after playing five hours. I don't think the extra data cached is a big deal to my computer, but the disappearing load times the higher values cause are pretty nice! ;^)

Sorry to pick nits, your advice really is pretty darn good and I've followed a lot of it. :^)

I think that those who have limited memory are most affected by the cell buffer sizes - they're using sizes that are more than what can fit into main memory, causing some of it to spill over into the pagefile, causing the game to slow down slowly over time. And who knows if Morrowind has any memory leaks?

Well yeah that was a guess and I was ACTUALLY thinking of a different oblivion thing. >.< doh



I think that morrowind might have some kind of memory leak or something weirdly similar, many people report it crashing after set amounts of time. Others, however, don't have to worry about random shutdowns. Honestly, I've had better luck with this when using MGE to set "CPU Idle" to 0. See, Morrowind usually doesn't even check to see how many milliseconds of CPU time other processes need. It just merilly chugs away until it's FPS is at 240 or so in memory. That's one big ini tweak, deffinitely already mentioned in the Original Post. But Morrowind still doesn't give up the stranglehold on the processor. The setting in MGE checks to see if anything is waiting to be processed, but if not returns control to Morrowind. You can also set it to wait 1ms, or however many... but that doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Blah blah blah. Sorry, I ranted.

I'm already familiar with most of the performance ini tweaks. However the lighting tweaks work marvelous (did I spell that right?) for me. Thanks Jeoshua. The lighting looks much better now.

The Max FPS tweak works quite well, i sorta wonder why it was set at 240fps in the first place. I'll try the weather tweaks on my bro's 1.6P4, 256MB clunker since weather brings it to a crawl. I might have missed it but is there a tweak to increase loading speed?

Edit: Decreasing the number of raindrops results in better performance.

Heh heh. Hey, it's my system! >_>
Only, replace Pentium with Athlon...

My bro's fps has improved! Tweaked:
-Max Fps=40
-The Thread Loading tweaks
-Interior Cell Buffer=1, Exterior Cell Buffer=4
-Number of Shadows=3
-Quadratic Lighting
-Replaced Fog and Rain with Clear Weather

Running around in Balmora went up from 8 fps to 20 fps. Inside fps is smooth at 40 fps. His inventory fps went up from 8 fps to 15 fps. His loading time between town and houses is half what it was. We found eliminating his massive inventory of scrolls, potions, and magic items helps too.

You could probably get even better FPS if you disabled shadows completely, Atlasraven. They're a bit buggy in Morrowind anyways, and I've never missed them.

Very true. I never thought the look of them was worth even 1 fps.

They're not too bad

They're poorly done compared to modern shadow techniques. I dropped my shadows down to 3 as well. I find it very humorous to run around on a laptop with a fast cpu but crappy onboard video and outperform gaming desktops. It's even more hilarious that my bro's P4 1.6ghz runs smoother than a 2-2.5Ghz system with the latest video card that hasn't tweaked his settings.

...and thats because of shadows?

Not solely but yes it did help. We changed more then just that. Have any of you with a lot of memory (512MB+) increased the cell buffers to load more of the map into memory? My theory is doing so will decrease the likelihood of random crashes.

I don't know what to increase it to, lol

I'm still a noob in the ini tweaking area

I have 1GB RAM, any reccommendations?

Increase interior and exterior buffers by 4. Then keep going slowly up. I think I'm currently +8,+8 from defaults on 1GB.

Just 8 more? I would think 1GB would be able to do more than that..?

Inch them up until you're satisfied. I personally didn't boost it too high because I have all kinds of stuff running in the background. I routinely leave Firefox up with about 11 tabs and sometimes videos, DVDs, and folders.

The ini tweak in the OP did increase fps, h f41 owever, it also caused my game to ctd every 15 minutes and so I had to take it off. This is too bad, I would have really liked to use it. BTW my external programs being used are MGE, MWSE, and FPS optimizer.

Has anyone else tried this tweak. It looks really promissing.

Actually, I think most people on PC have used some/all of these tweaks. Most of this information was gathered over time, from several different players. Try doing one or two, see what happens.

Consider this a marker post, but i wanted to mention to make sure you bold or underline the whole back up file in advance thing ^.^

well, I've tried modding the ini file myself, but I didn't understand what a lot of it did, so this will probably help me, especially with the system I'm using

PIII-1.3GHz
nVidia GeForce2 Go
256MB ram

total junk, but it's all I got...in the mean time I'll just try and make things better with the help of this guide, thanks!

Thanks for this thread peeps. I really appreciate it.

256MB of ram (not even quite this - it says only 224)
2.8 GHz
And only an on-board videocard

Oddly enough, I'm used to all the CTDs, random jolts, lagginess etc., but hopefully these tweaks I've tried will help lots. I'm trying a few and will now try out the game. *crosses fingers*.

If this thread should get culled, which will happen someday, Yacoby has it and some other helpful threads archived here.

This needs a bump back to the front!:)

I haven't used it to increase FPS (I was trying to see what I could do with quality), but the pixel shaded water options (can't remember offhand, will post more & screenshots later) could probably be used to speed things up as well, by decreasing the resolution the water is rendered at (or you could turn it off entirely).