There has been quite a few complaints levelled at Bethesda for an apparent lack of bug testing. I think every owner of Morrowind that has played for over an hour will have received at least one crash to desktop. I really enjoy this game and it is well worth the follow through, so in an effort to help the games players out i am going to post this thread which will hopefully help some people. This is by no means gospel and is just my experiences, if i have got anything wrong feel free to correct me, also feel free to share your experiences and hopefully we will start getting everyone's FPS above 5
A lot of this will involved tweaking the morrowind.ini so please back up any of the altered files before hand...
My System:
AMD 1200
Soltek SL-DRV
256 DDR Ram
GeForce 256 DDR
Creative Live 5.1
First off is FPS itself, open the morrowind.ini (found in the main directory) there is a line that says - ShowFPS=0 replace the zero with a one and load up the game, you should then get a number in the bottom right corner, this will fluctuate greatly depending on location and settings, the important thing is to find an area or location which you can get a mean average from, say the silt strider port in Balmora, every change you make you can then compare to that location.
I personally started the game with real time shadows on and quite a hefty view distance, i seemed to be running through treacle, i thought it was the poor athletics skill of my protaganist..not so. One of the major tweaks is the real time shadows, turning those off raised my fps by about 10, they do very little and you get normal shadows anyway. View distance made very little difference to my game in outside areas, mostly it just took slightly longer to load.
There is an option called AI area (IIRC - i am writing this from work and can't remember all the names, i will edit tonight for the correct name) afaics it alters the distance with which AI reacts to you, i set this to near zero. Again this made a huge difference on FPS.
The differences in screen resolutions are also an issue. I did play it at 1024x768, but swapped down to 800x600 in an effort to raise frame rates...this is by no means Q3
It did succeed for a while, but i found the merchant and inventory screens too jumbled...so i swapped back and tried other methods. If you can stand the lower resolutions it will help.A strange one i discovered the other day, if your play starts to become choppy press Alt+TAB once, this will return you to desktop, (only do this if your desktop resolution is the same as Morrowind's otherwise it might get confusing) now click once on the minimized window, morrowind will return to it's normal non choppy play. Strange, eh?
A lot of Morrowind's problems seem to stem from it's handling of memory, undoubtedly the patch will solve this
I will post more later on when i remember some of the other things i altered.
Hope this helps
