Widescreen Gaming Forum

Got the Steam version of this a while back and decided to load it on my Dell XPS M1730 laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, nVidia 8700M GT SLI, Vista 32-bit). As recommended by the confirmed solution thread on this site, I installed Morrowind FPS Optimizer right off the bat to set the resolution to 1920x1200 and to increase the maximum view distance when above a certain FPS threshold.

Unfortunately, I found that my FPS was *horrible* in the first town (15 FPS when standing in the middle of town facing roughly north) regardless of view distance. This seemed ridiculous since Fallout 3 ran pretty well on the same system. After extensive Googling and trying other things (including toggling SLI and vsync settings in my video drivers), I decided to try running without Morrowind FPS Optimizer and the game ran much better (~50 FPS in the previously mentioned location).

I then decided to play with Morrowind Graphics Extender ( http://morrgraphext.sourceforge.net/ ), and found that it has all of the relevant features of Morrowind FPS Optimizer (widescreen resolution selection and on-the-fly draw distance adjustment) without any of the performance hit. The downside of MGE is that I have to either disable UAC, or else run both MGE's config utility and Morrowind itself as administrator because MGE doesn't know how to find the Morrowind registry entries otherwise.

Just wanted to share my experience in case anyone else runs into this.

Morrowind runs on DirectX 8.0 and PS 1.0 if I'm not mistaken. MGE adds DirectX 8.1 and PS 1.1 support to Morrowind to offload more work to the GPU. Because the game is severely CPU bound it won't run well on a low-frequency processor like those found in laptops (or ones with long pipelines like the P4, for that matter). I don't think the view distance attenuator in FPS Optimizer is that good anyway. It adds more overhead for one because it needs to calculate your average FPS over a given interval to adjust it.

As I said, it's nothing inherent to the laptop itself, as it runs stock Morrowind just fine. It's a gaming laptop that runs games like Fallout 3, Half-Life 2 and even other CPU-bound titles like World of Warcraft (when I still played it over a year ago) decently.

There's just something about Morrowind FPS Optimizer specifically that killed my performance even at default draw distances. It must have been doing something that caused too much overhead in Vista.

MGE does the same job without the same issues, though, so I'm happy. It also supports various shader effects, but I tested a few and they killed my framerate. Not a big deal though.