MORROWIND: Pauses, stuttering & slowness in general - is this to be expected?
Rich
Just Me (tm) or what. Please bear with me. =)
Recently installed & patched Morrowind (on a defragged partition, for what
it's worth). Machine is an Intel P4/1.5GHz w/512MB RAM, 6+GB of free HD
space, ATI Radeon 8500 64MB, SBLive5.1. All drivers are current (which, as
far as the SBLive goes, isn't saying much, since they haven't done much with
those drivers in a while now...). I run the game at 1024x768, shadows off.
AI distance is relatively near, and the "distance" setting (I forget the
name) is right in the middle.
First thing I noticed, is that game speed on the machine doesn't seem very
much affected by the resolution I choose. Speeds are very similar between
800x600 & 1600x1200 modes. A little strange..
I haven't played with the FPS, so I can't quote numbers (it's not really an
FPS issue I'm wondering about anyhow), but I have noticed a couple of things
that are making the game annoying to play.
1) The long load times between zones (or cells). By long, I mean in the
area of 10-20 seconds. Not long on a geological scale, but long for games.
:) There's little-to-no HD activity going on during these loads (or CD
activity), so I'm thinking it must be the loading of textures into the video
card? That's a hideous load time, especially if you wander about outside
enough, and finding this happening every 2-4 minutes or so.
2) Bringing up the menus (right-click) for the first time in a zone takes
5-10 seconds. Like it has a LOT to think about in order to bring it up.
Subsequent menu-calling is relatively instant. The only thing I've figured
is that this is due to the menu overhead map needing to load. But this is
also annoying.
3) LOTS of stuttering in general. Hesitations and pauses to look around.
Hesitations and pauses to move around, just about anyone (especially towns).
These range from 1-5 seconds in length, and completely cut up the gameplay.
When it's not stuttering, the movement and mouselooking is pretty darned
smooth (without exact numbers, I'd guess in the 25-30fps range) for a game
like this, and very playable if it would stay that way. But turning around
in a building you've just entered, or something similar, results in
ridiculous jumps and stutters, like something can't keep up. Yet my machine
SHOULD be able to keep up with what I'm doing.
4) Bartering menus are VERY slow. The only exception seems to be when the
merchant only has about a dozen items, and I've only got a few. If I have a
lot, or he has a lot? EVERYTHING is slow. Clicking on something causes a
1-2 second hesitation before it registers; same with dropping or selling.
Needless to say, this makes selling off a lot of things a very
time-consuming process, not to mention patience-testing.
5) Minor point, but the intro movies also stutter, but only visually.
Audibly, they're perfect. It's just the video stutters constantly (and
slightly) all through. I've encountered other games that do that (none come
immediately to mind), on this machine, and past machines and it's clearly
not the case on all machines, but some. I don't get it. Feels sloppy and
adds to the "negative" impression of the game.
Any insight/thoughts/tweaks/help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
for reading. :)
~ Rich
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John Lewis
Very Wierd......
Have you turned off all Viruskillers ? Or used the Freeware utility
"EndItAll" to selectively shut down other background programs ?
There is normally some video stuttering, but the interruptions that
you describe are gross exaggerations of any normal delays, indicating
that something nasty may be hogging lots of CPU cycles.The
customary culprits of insufficient virtual-memory disk-space or RAM
do not seem to be an issue here. You are using Windows-default
virtual memory setting and not a too-small manual setting ?
You are not by accident clocking your processor at a
BIOS-default rate, by any chance ?
John Lewis
Carlos Gomez
>I'm desperately trying to get some feedback on this, to find out if it's
>Just Me (tm) or what. Please bear with me. =)
It's not just you. But the lenght of the delays you are reporting a
much longer than I'm getting. I'm on a p3-900 with a Radeon 8500 and
256 RAM.
The Loading In/Exterior takes about 3-5 seconds, with occasional
longer ones. There is a thread load which I guess tries to minimize
the explicit loads. This seems to cause a slight pause as I walk.
But it's nowhere near what you report.
Mikko Marjamaki
news:3d24a07b$1...@news4.newsgroups.com:
> First thing I noticed, is that game speed on the machine doesn't seem
> very much affected by the resolution I choose. Speeds are very
> similar between 800x600 & 1600x1200 modes. A little strange..
On my machine, I can definitely tell differene between, say, 800x600 and
1024x768. The latter is much heavier, especially in towns, and most notably
in Balmora. But lately I've been using bigger resolution because it seems
more stable, 800x600 would kick me to desktop more often.
But it's "only" TB 1.2GhZ, Geoforce 2 Pro with 384MB of memory.
> I haven't played with the FPS, so I can't quote numbers (it's not
> really an FPS issue I'm wondering about anyhow), but I have noticed a
> couple of things that are making the game annoying to play.
Not sure if you know, but you can turn on FPS meter within Morrowind.ini
Mine ranges from sub-5 to 60 which is where I capped it.
> 1) The long load times between zones (or cells). By long, I mean in
> the area of 10-20 seconds. Not long on a geological scale, but long
> for games.
Shouldn't take that long, I'd estimate loading between zones takes about 5
seconds. And that seems to be quite common, so I think you can fix this
with some tweaking.
> 2) Bringing up the menus (right-click) for the first time in a zone
> takes 5-10 seconds. Like it has a LOT to think about in order to
> bring it up.
Haven't noticed anything like this. Always instant for me. But...
> 3) LOTS of stuttering in general. Hesitations and pauses to look
> around. Hesitations and pauses to move around, just about anyone
> (especially towns). These range from 1-5 seconds in length, and
> completely cut up the gameplay. Turning around in a building you've
> just entered, or something similar, results in ridiculous jumps and
> stutters, like something can't keep up. Yet my machine SHOULD be able
> to keep up with what I'm doing.
stuttering is something I've grown very familiar with too. Especially with
barter menus, strongholds and some spell effects cause lot's of this. Not
much indoors, but outdoors seems very heavy to deal with. I agree, you
should be getting better performance with your gear, especially since your
settings are even lower than what I use.
(800x600, view distance and AI at minium and Direct3D settings at best
performance setting, fps usually stayed over 20. But there's still problem
of instablity, and game is also rather ugly with everything set up for best
possible performance.)
Having said all that, I still think it's a great game and has more replay
value than most.
JASG
"Rich" <ri...@here.there> >
> Recently installed & patched Morrowind (on a defragged partition, for what
> it's worth). Machine is an Intel P4/1.5GHz w/512MB RAM, 6+GB of free HD
> space, ATI Radeon 8500 64MB, SBLive5.1. All drivers are current (which,
as
> far as the SBLive goes, isn't saying much, since they haven't done much
with
> those drivers in a while now...). I run the game at 1024x768, shadows
off.
> AI distance is relatively near, and the "distance" setting (I forget the
> name) is right in the middle.
AMD 1.4, 512, GF2, SBLive here...1024*768 in the game, shadows off...about
the same settings as you.
>
> First thing I noticed, is that game speed on the machine doesn't seem very
> much affected by the resolution I choose. Speeds are very similar between
> 800x600 & 1600x1200 modes. A little strange..
Some difference
> 1) The long load times between zones (or cells). By long, I mean in the
> area of 10-20 seconds.
1-2 sec.
> 2) Bringing up the menus (right-click) for the first time in a zone takes
> 5-10 seconds. Like it has a LOT to think about in order to bring it up.
> Subsequent menu-calling is relatively instant. The only thing I've
figured
> is that this is due to the menu overhead map needing to load. But this is
> also annoying.
3-4 sec at first, then 1 sec.
>
> 3) LOTS of stuttering in general. Hesitations and pauses to look
around......
> .....ridiculous jumps and stutters, like something can't keep up. Yet my
machine
> SHOULD be able to keep up with what I'm doing.
I had these too and the game was almost unplayable. Funny, but when I
reinstalled the SB Liveware stuff FPS shot up and is now pleasingly fast,
except
during heavy rain in towns. Fortunately I'm about to upgrade to a GF4 Ti4200
series card :) Your Radeon should be rather faster than my GF2, so I think
your SB is in a knot too. How can this affect adversely graphical
performance? Damn if I know, but it did for me!
Ed Cowling
writes
>
>3) LOTS of stuttering in general. Hesitations and pauses to look around.
>Hesitations and pauses to move around, just about anyone (especially towns).
>These range from 1-5 seconds in length, and completely cut up the gameplay.
>When it's not stuttering, the movement and mouselooking is pretty darned
I played this game on a 1ghz PC with 256 megs of RAM and IMHO it was
unplayable because of all the delays & stutters.
Now I have it on a 2ghz Dell with a full Gig of RAM, and it is superb.
It still stutters (I kid you not), but only for a second or so at some
terrain load points.
Like Ultima IX I think this game is ahead of most of the hardware people
are currently using, and a lot of people are going to put it on the
shelf for a year or so.
--
Ed Cowling
Morten Wennevik
CPU cycles. Turn off all background programs not needed to play the
game (especially antivirus/office type programs)
Trickle
>First thing I noticed, is that game speed on the machine doesn't seem very
>much affected by the resolution I choose. Speeds are very similar between
>800x600 & 1600x1200 modes. A little strange..
Thats because you would need the stupid shadows on + 1600 res AND a
hack to enable 2x+ max view distance to tax your Radeon. Spec
requirements for Morrowind arnt as bad as people make out.
>1) The long load times between zones (or cells). By long, I mean in the
>area of 10-20 seconds.
This is not normal. Norton Av running in the background? Have you
tried making a permanent 1/2 gig swap file etc? You dont have any
silly bios settings - 8 meg aperture size etc? DMA enabled on hard
drives etc? Presumably you defagged before posting here?
Drivers are not the be all and end all of PC configuration. Even if
you have downloaded the correct drivers, installing them in the worng
order can sometimes even hose a system.