N-patch support for Morrowind

[John Reynolds]

http://morrowind.nm.ru/Morrowind%20FPS%20Optimizer/

This little utility also lets you push the in-game fog back, increasing the maximun view distance by 3x. Enabling the N-patch support brought my 9700 Pro to its knees, at least at 1280x960 with 6x AA, 8x AF, and the view distance maxed out. Looks incredible, though, and definitely worth trying out if you have the game.

[Tahir2]

Very interesting.. gonna try it later.. :)

[horvendile]

Enabling the N-patch support brought my 9700 Pro to its knees

I was under the impression that the R300 had no hardware support for N-patches. Er... that is the same thing as trueform, right? Anyway, if there is no hardware support, I suppose it's the good old CPU that's got to get its hands dirty (not sure with exactly what, though). Maybe that could partly explain the slowdwn?

I mean, apart from rendering a truckload of extra polygons...

[K.I.L.E.R]

JR is soooo slooooow on the news. :)
This is old.

[T2k]

BTW, if you guys are interested - take look here:

http://hrc.webzeppelin.hu/Patches-By_T2k!/TRUFORM%99_patches-By_T2k!/

[Goragoth]

So while on the topic of Morrowind I would like to ask a question: has a computer that can run Morrowind at consitently high fps actually been invented yet?

My specs are: AthlonXP2100+;Soltek NForce2 mobo;512 DDR266 ram; Radeon9700Pro, and I have to turn visibilty down to about 20%, no shadows and run it at 800x600 to get what I consider smooth framerates most (though not all) the time. I do have 4xAA and 8xAF enabled too but still games like Unreal2 run super smooth at high res but not Morrowind. Great game but crappy engine I guess. Or is it just me? :shock:

[Rodéric]

The worst game ever : Morrowind

Ok that's not true it has great graphics and many interesting thing, but the fact that it runs as slow as an old turtle even on high end PC makes it not worth a penny.
:p

It's slow on my computer too.
Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB DDR333, ASUS A7V8X, RadeOn 8500 64MB.

[Jon Brittan]

It's funny you guys say it runs slow on some reasonably specced machines, as I was given a copy for free and as it wasn't one of my "Must play" games, I decided to save my better machines and chucked it on an Athlon 800, with 512MB PC133 and a GF2MX400 and it runs perfectly smoothly, there were one or two stutters, but that's in the entire game as I have "finished" it (completed the storyline, not done all the side quests).

[Entropy]

Hey, it's not a competitive game! What does it matter if the frame rate is low, or if you have to dial down your view distance a bit to get your fps where you want them.

I want games to have eye candy headroom for my future hardware. Why should they run fast with everything maxed out at launch? That just means it has nowhere to go.

I do agree that the engine would seem to be less than optimal from a performance standpoint. :)

Entropy

[John Reynolds]

I've heard the engine renders from back to front, so say goodbye to all fill/bandwidth saving techniques ATi and Nvidia have adopted.

I thought the game was extremely playable with the above settings on my machine (P4 2.4B, 512MB of 1066 RDRAM, 9700 Pro).

[Goragoth]

Oh sure, the game is playable enough, its not like its going at 5fps or anything but I get somewhat irritated when a game does not feel entirely smooth, heck that's the main reason I got a R9700Pro. Its just interesting to see that for example Unreal2 has much nicer graphics (more polys, higher res textures) and still runs much better. Really proves that not all engines are made equal. That said I have actually been playing a lot of Morrowind lately now that it runs ok on my new setup. Didn't like it at all running on a p3-866 with a TNT2.