Do I need to upgrade?

[Ancra]

"Ancra" <[email protected]> schreef in bericht
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Morrowind does not run well on my AthlonXP200+, 512MB pc2100, Radeon9700pro,
via KT266A mobo. Indoors it's okayish, outdoors the framerate's quite low.
You have to tone down a lot of settings to be able to look around jerk-free.
I've been reading the other pc.games newsgroup when the game came out, and a
lot of gamers had performance issue's with it as well.

Well, I'm taking you seriously, and I'm assuming XP200+ is a typo for
XP2000+, but I have to say something is wrong.
I've lurked on Morrowind groups for years, and IMO you're wrong. "Lot
of gamers" do not have performance issues with it. At least not any
that are not obvious or easily explainable. Like a wimpy videocard, or
Win2k etc. Lots of gamers have various issues with it, but not so much
inexplicable performance issues.

(Just a comment: Lot's of people seem to complain about slow computers
lately. Look around at the threads! Maybe they've missed to protect
themselves from the latest volly of bugbear, worms and
blasterviruses?)

I've run Morrowind on a number of computers and videocards. And it
runs quite WELL on my 98SE 700MHz K7 Athlon, GF 3 Ti 200! 1024x768,
max distance, realtime shadows, pixelshaders, everything but
antialiasing and anisotropic.
Even in really bad places, like in Balmora, it only rarely, briefly,
went down as low as 15fps.
It runs flawlessly on my XP3000+.
So there's very good reasons to try to look for what is wrong with
your system! What framerates do you get?

You have a great videoboard, so unless you have somehow configured it
poorly (too large agp aperture?), I think the problem is with cpu
load/threads. My immediate suggestion is the one I've already given,
turn off threadloading (that does cause Morrowind to freeze during
terrain generation, but that is IMO quite OK. And it will do that
anyway, often enough).
Also, there's not much point in running a long AI distance.
What patches have you applied, and what changes have you made to the
morrowind.ini file?
A crucial issue with Morrowind, that could be overlooked, is that it
_requires_ sounddrivers to be DX8.1 compliant. When did you last
update your sounddrivers? But I suppose, as recent as XP2000 should be
alright.

A real worry is that you say it's only "okayish" _INDOORS_!
That really hits me. I'm sure I was way above 30fps, all the time,
even on an old Matrox G400, indoors!
It seems like some confirmation that the problem is on the cpu side.
Maybe you have something running in the background?
Running other games well, doesn't proove anything. lots of games gets
by with little cpu. But at some point you'll pass the line where it
does matter. The key is, you seem to get less performance than you
should have.


ancra

 

[Ancra]

Me too with a ti4200 (overclocked) on a 1Ghz P3 with 512Mb CAS2. I
keep feeling the urge to upgrade but my PC seems more capable then a
few of my friends PCs that are supposed to be more powerfull. I must
just have been lucky picking the parts?

No, you have a great videocard and a great cpu and is whipping your
ram.. That ol' 1GHz PIII is probably comparable to 1.6-1.7GHz P4 as
long as the P4 can't use SSE2. Whatever you do, don't "upgrade" with a
Celeron-P4.


ancra

 

[Ancra]

K. I have a 256 card and I have the aperature set at 128. Maybe I'll try
bumping it up.

- NO! Turn it down to 64 instead.
The performance curve (as a function of aperture) is absolutely flat
as long as it is not 'too small' or 'too large'. Tinkering with this
will not award you with any gains. And the belief "more should be
better" is fallacious.
On systems with 64MB graphics cards or better, 'too small' seems to be
like 16MB or smaller, so even if some game emerged that would make
32MB too small, 64MB should be safely clear in the hi perf window.

'too large' will dramatically lower your cpu-side system performance!
Really too large will crash at least W9x OSes and maybe the others as
well, I don't know.
'too large' depends on a lot of system factors, cpu level 1 cache, OS,
ram, bla bla, but some of these are locked into Windows32, so I
wouldn't ever expect really large apertures to work on current
cpus&OS.
64MB shouldn't ever be 'too large' on a 386-512MB system. So once
again, 64MB is a pretty sure bet.
128MB could possibly be too large on a 512MB winXP running a hungry
game like the discussed Morrowind. Just a hunch, I really don't know.

_Both_ 'too small' and 'too large' penalties will be triggered by
graphics heavy software. So it's _not_ a good idea to greet a graphic
juggernaut with a really large aperture!


ancra

 

[Sanddancer]

No, you have a great videocard and a great cpu and is whipping your
ram.. That ol' 1GHz PIII is probably comparable to 1.6-1.7GHz P4 as
long as the P4 can't use SSE2. Whatever you do, don't "upgrade" with a
Celeron-P4.


ancra

Don't worry, my next upgrade will be something worthwhile. I'm just
amazed at how well it's holding up.

Sanddancer

 

[JumpKick]

I've got the latest drivers and antivirus for everything (Audigy soundcard
btw); firewall built into router. I do recall performance being a mixed bag
with this game from what I've read on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games, much like GTA3
was unpredictable on certain systems. I might have a wrong image of the game
because people with problems report more than people whose game runs fine.
You're right, I might be having system issues because I have Serious Sam 2
installed and I don't get quite the sky high framerates that I was expecting
after seeing benchmarks of this game on similair systems (+100fps - I do
realize benchmarks are witouth sound).
You're right about hte indoors framerate- that was around 50 fps on my
Geforce 2 GTS already.
But when I installed the R9700pro and crancked up the detail levels in
Morrowind, and started the game from the beginning, the framrate was around
25 fps (measured with fraps) in the ship already
Have uninstalled it at the moment because of lack of time sadly, I can't
report the outdoor framerates now.

 

[JumpKick]

"Ancra" <[email protected]> schreef in bericht

thanks for the suggestions by the way, I'm going to search for possible
system issues now

 

[JumpKick]

"Ancra" <[email protected]> schreef in bericht

what is recommended for a 128 MB card in a PC with 512MB of system RAM?

 

[JAD]

128...works very well with my 7500 64m and the 9700 128m

 

[Ancra]

"Ancra" <[email protected]> schreef in bericht

what is recommended for a 128 MB card in a PC with 512MB of system RAM?

I think the recommendation is always 64MB. I would guess it would work
just as well with 32MB or 128MB, but it won't serve any purpose.
The idea is that 64MB is unlikely to be too small, and unlikely to be
too large.


ancra

 

[Jonathan]

Where is the "Aperture" setting to be found at? I'm looking all thru my
Nvidia settings and don't see such a setting. I found a PCI Texture Mem
Size = 64megs.

Jonathan

 

[Tim Auton]

Where is the "Aperture" setting to be found at? I'm looking all thru my
Nvidia settings and don't see such a setting. I found a PCI Texture Mem
Size = 64megs.

It's in your BIOS.


Tim

 

[methylenedioxy]

It's in your BIOS.


Tim

lol....
Have a look around, no-one recommends anything above 64mb aperture anyway as
it can cause (and mostly does with crap nvidia cards) instability....

 

[Xocyll]

(e-mail address removed) (Ancra) looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:

Well, I'm taking you seriously, and I'm assuming XP200+ is a typo for
XP2000+, but I have to say something is wrong.
I've lurked on Morrowind groups for years, and IMO you're wrong. "Lot
of gamers" do not have performance issues with it. At least not any
that are not obvious or easily explainable. Like a wimpy videocard, or
Win2k etc. Lots of gamers have various issues with it, but not so much
inexplicable performance issues.

Actually at release a lot of gamers did have issues.

That's the big reason Bethesda made their patch work even if you have
removed the safedisc protection, since safedisc was a huge performance
hit for a lot of people.

I wish more companies would actually test their product WITH the copy
protection installed instead of declaring it finished and then pasting
on the protection at the last seconds.

More importantly, I wish more companies would follow Bethesda's lead and
acknowledge the copy protection does cause problems.


Most of the crashes other people got, I didn't - until I installed
Bloodmoon, guaranteed crash to desktop within 3 hours every time.

Xocyll

 

[Ancra]

Actually at release a lot of gamers did have issues.

That's the big reason Bethesda made their patch work even if you have
removed the safedisc protection, since safedisc was a huge performance
hit for a lot of people.

I wish more companies would actually test their product WITH the copy
protection installed instead of declaring it finished and then pasting
on the protection at the last seconds.

More importantly, I wish more companies would follow Bethesda's lead and
acknowledge the copy protection does cause problems.


Most of the crashes other people got, I didn't - until I installed
Bloodmoon, guaranteed crash to desktop within 3 hours every time.

(I haven't installed Bloodmoon yet, It's lying here, but...)
This is interesting, and I know Xocyll information is usually good.
But as sometimes is the case, I don't think I entirely understands.
I know startup crashes due to copyprotection is/was common, and I too,
(depending on which CD drive I used), was afflicted by that.

But you're saying there is some thread started, that may eat up
resources and cause low performance during gameplay?
How should those plagued by this (? JumpKick & Johnny ?) resolve the
problem?
Is it enough to patch the game?


ancra

 

[Xocyll]

(e-mail address removed) (Ancra) looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:

(I haven't installed Bloodmoon yet, It's lying here, but...)
This is interesting, and I know Xocyll information is usually good.
But as sometimes is the case, I don't think I entirely understands.
I know startup crashes due to copyprotection is/was common, and I too,
(depending on which CD drive I used), was afflicted by that.

But you're saying there is some thread started, that may eat up
resources and cause low performance during gameplay?
How should those plagued by this (? JumpKick & Johnny ?) resolve the
problem?
Is it enough to patch the game?

Well patching is always a good start.
Make sure the safedisc crap is gone (not sure if it gets removed by
later patches or not since I have to use no-cd cracks to play at all -
safedisc just refuses to accept that my cd-rom actually exists.)

[Funny how the installer sees the cd just fine to install the game, but
the security check doesn't eh?]

In game, move the AI slider down near minimum (sets the activation
distance of NPCs, so they won't talk at you until you're close)
Turn the Shadows OFF. It's a minor graphical effect, but it has a
large effect on performance.
I personally don't use the pixel shader - only affects water as far as I
know and I prefer being able to see into the water.

Other things that may influence stability are other programs/apps
running in the background.
As like as not I'll have Agent running as well as seti@home, but neither
of those is particularly resource intensive.
Background virus scanners should definitely be shut down, ditto for file
find type apps, instant messengers and so on.

Bloodmoon I think has a memory leak in it, since quitting out before a
crash _doesn't_ tend to free up the memory again (I don't use a fixed
size swapfile, but with 512 meg of ram I don't hit swap too much. After
playing Bloodmoon for a couple hours the swapfile will be used and it
doesn't shrink back down to 0 after i've quit out, which it would do if
the memory was being freed up.)


Hrm it occurs to me Bloodmoon might not be totally at fault, since I did
have one hardware change, from an SB PCI128 to an SB Live, round about
the same time I got Bloodmoon. Then again, other people seem to be
having the same problems with Bloodmoon, even with no problems in
Morrowind or Tribunal.

Oh yes, and Tine Fisher posted the following in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg recently:

Modifying morrowind.ini

A) Framerate
Max FPS=240
Change to
Max FPS=60

DontThreadLoad=0
Change to
DontThreadLoad=1

Exterior Cell Buffer=32
Change to
Exterior Cell Buffer=45
--------
UseQuadratic=0
QuadraticMethod=2
QuadraticValue=16.0
QuadraticRadiusMult=1.0
---------
Change To
--------
UseQuadratic=1
QuadraticMethod=2
QuadraticValue=16.0
QuadraticRadiusMult=4.0


Well that should give you a few things to look at.

Xocyll

 

[JumpKick]

Where is the "Aperture" setting to be found at? I'm looking all thru my
Nvidia settings and don't see such a setting. I found a PCI Texture Mem
Size = 64megs.

Jonathan

your motherboards bios