Tech/Performance Question

[Medieval Dead]

What exactly would improve in the game if I upgraded my memory from 256 to 512+? Would it shorten loading time? Would it get rid of lag in the outdoors (especially when it's raining)?

[Disciple]

It could help some, but there's no guarantee. Your CPU and video card will have a big impact too depending on what you have.

[flibulzbuth]

The rain effect is CPU/video intensive, not RAM intensive. RAM is used to load a larger amount of the map and textures, which shouldn't be a problem with 256 meg. I doubt you will see a big increase in performance with 512 meg but it never hurts.

One good thing to do before loading the game, kill all unnecessary applications running in the background. ie. ctrl-alt-del (once) and stop all except EXPLORER and SYSTRAY.

[ 05-11-2002, 11:46 PM: Message edited by: flibulzbuth ]

[Medieval Dead]

Well I have a 1.2 gig Athlon w/GeForce 3 (64mb) vid card. I currently have 256 MB. I'm trying to see if I can improve my performance without a complete overhaul. I just figured that my memory is the only thing that's minimum specs for Win2k and maybe increasing it would help in some of the minor problems I am experiencing... I'm actually running the game pretty well, although I'm not a big fan of the load times when you reload your game (it's about a minute or so) and being in the outdoors is a bit laggy or has a lot continous loading. Maybe I'm just being nitpicky with a game this huge? [img]smile.gif[/img]

[vesselle]

hon, i just can't stress this enough:

..run a complete scandisk and defrag.
..update ALL your drivers: via 4in1's, geforce, and soundcard. make sure they are the newest and all DirectX8.1 compatible.
..make sure you have DX8.1 installed
..make sure your copy of W2K has been completely updated.
..turn off EVERYTHING but systray and explorer when you play the game.
do NOT run any anti-virus programs, do NOT run WinDoctor or equvalent, do not allow ANYTHING that periodically goes online for updates.
..still having problems?
....turn your sound hardware accelertion way down or all the way off
....go to Start button/Run command
....type in dxdiag
....go to Sound tab
....lower left "Hardware Acceleration" slider
....slide tab most of the way down, or just all the way off.
....close the window.

try it out. hopefully it worked.

V***V

[Yack]

Medieval Dead you answer yourself in your second post [img]smile.gif[/img]

Everyone, even the person with a monster rig for playing have some performance issues with Morrowind, the true is that the game its just plain HUGE, the outside lag you experience its not for lack of ram, i haven't found a way to make the outdoor zones to preload and don't think can be done until they release some patch, as it is now its mostly hard drive speed, but even with a fast SCSI there is a bit of lag.

[Medieval Dead]

Thanks for the help everyone. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Lord Killjoy]

256 to 512 a little help but this game is pure power CPU and Video

recommendation:

1ghz +

geforce 3 +

ati radeon

Here's what I have and I run 1024 X 768 flawlessly with out lag or chop.

950OC mhz athlon (with 4 cooling fans)

768 MBS of ram

Ati - Radeon All in Wonder 64MBs DDR ram

50 X cdrom with cdcache

Hercules Game Theater XP (I recommend this highly cheaper and better than SB platinum live 5.1 + breakout)

Ram will help very little past 256MBs playing video games under Direct X. So pull out that Ati diamond stealth and get a geforce3/4 or a radeon and Overclock that CPU. Have fun

ORC KNIGHTS RULE!!!

[Himura]

guys,

if you have load time problems... do what Vesselle says, defrag you fraking drive. It doesn't matter if you just reload the OS for the nth time, as soon as you install MW, your drive will be fragmented. Defrag will help lots on load time. Check your swap file as well.

Frame rate wise... lets just hope the patch will fix it.

[DraconisRex]

1. Defrag your harddrive. That always helps.

2. Put in 256M more memory. It doesn't hurt and it can help. I
doubled my memory and I seem to have far fewer complaints than

3. If you're willing to do it, and your motherboard can support 4GB
of memory, you can make a virtual disk in your memory and use
one-half of it for your Morrowind file. The entire process
is complex and requires mirroring.

Essentially, you'll have load and unload the game from archives
before and after you play. And if something goes wrong, it can
go HORRIBLY WRONG. And not all games are amenable to this anyway.

3. Turn down your sound and AI options. THe less processing you have
to do, the faster the game will run.

4. Consider upgrading your video memory, if possible. Or getting a
new card. AT LEAST UPDATE your drivers. (And don't do something
dumb like me and download them and forget to install them and
go out and spend buku dollars on all kinds of system upgrades.)

5. Turn off everything but Explorer and Systray by CTR-ALT-DEL and
turning those annoying little TSRs off.