Major framerate hit

Possibly because the meshes aren't as optimised? SINCE they were originally created from the converter. I have a MUCH lower PC power

2 Gigz ram

128mb graphics card

2.16 single processor

Vista Home Premium

An oldie, recently repaired, but I get a 'fast enough speed to have fun' FPS. In Morroblivion its actually not that bad for me. I have yet to use visual overhaul but I've applied the weapons retexture. Does anyone know if I should use visual overhaul with the specs above? Really tempted... Do these meshes/textures make the game more stable?

Hmmm Perhaps an optimization mod should be done, I would do it but... last time, kinda made oblivion ctd.... a big mess you see.

Morrowind meshes are rather poorly optimised ... especially the collision shapes: they are nearly as hi-poly as the meshes themselves.

For a start lower the screen resolution for oblivion, it can usually make massive improvements.

Try PyFFI if you're hoping to optimize, I swear I did something wrong last time I used it, but I recommended because I actually download them and it does massive increases for me, good luck!

I have a sony vaio, 2.13 duo core intel processer, ati 4650 mobility radeon and 6gb of ram. I can play Oblivion on almost max with 20-30fps but in morrowind it drops to 13-20fps in cities and 17-25 not in a city. Indoors I get 30fps (in morrowind). I tried turning distant land off but I only got an extra 4 or 5 fps.

The huge drop in framerates when looking at cities is the reason why Bethesdsa made gates for all of the cities in Oblivion - the cities in Oblivion are not part of the rest of the world, they are self contained units.  Morrowind is like running Oblivion with the Open Cities mod installed.  Consequently, you need a powerful graphics card to run Morrowind in the Oblivion engine (or to run Open Cities).

Nathan576, your video card is nowhere near fast enough without lowering your graphics settings in video options.

My GTX 470 spins up the fans a LOT when I am running Morroblivion and I only get 15-30 fps in cities, even with 3.0ghz and 24gb of ram.  I am running full graphics and OBGE with 4 shaders (Godrays, HBAO, NormalFilterAA, and SSII) though.

And this is with a $250 graphics card.  I have been thinking of upgrading to a 570 or 580 and putting the 470 into my other box... but ca$h money.  Easier just to drop the settings a bit or turn off shaders...

I've optimized all of Morroblivion's meshes with pyffi but I can't honestly say I've noticed any fps improvement.

It seems strange that Fallout New Vegas runs at nearly twice the fps as Morroblivion does for me, and is at higher settings as well. Having said that, places like Balmora and Ebonheart ran pretty slowly on old Morrowind as well.

I think I'll probably put Morroblivion aside for now until I've upgraded my (admittedly elderly) graphics card.

For Morrowind\Morroblivion the collision meshes are as much (if not more) detailed as the geometry ... unlike oblivion where most collision surfaces are simplified shapes like planes and spheres. Pyffi's job is to remove 'duplicate' vertices from 3ds max exports ... it does not decimate polygons and so is not really going to help much with the problem here. There is no automatic way of reducing polygons without using a proper 3d suite ... and even then you'd get problems like deteriorated shapes. LOD is also a problem: Oblivion's 'distant' buildings are low-poly models with very low-res textures. But since there are no seperate _far buildings for Morroblivion; Distant stuff is as crisp as it can be. Similarly Trees in Oblivion are also very highly optimized ... when you are a certain distance away they get replaced by billboards (simple planes which keep facing the camera) ... on the other hand all of of Morrowind's converted trees are always complete meshes. Finally, as thermador pointed out, Vanilla oblivion cities are in seperate worldspaces whereas in Morrowind\Morroblivion everything is in a single worldspace.

I'll still suggest people to try out a lower screen resolution ... I think it helps a lot without costing too much eye candy.

instead of just disabling distant land, try to delete all _far.nif distant files you can find in meshes/morro/x and in meshes/morro/f and see if that also helps.

Interesting. I noticed I was getting quite a few CTDs around caldera when I started moving close enough to where it would render in the background.  As in I would take a step, I'd see it suddenly appear, and the game crashes.  As long as I kept typing pcb or whatever that command was, I'd be able to make it. 

I also want to mention that I don't have framerate issues like you mentioned here.  The only ones I get are the ones associated with Cliff Racers when they randomly appear in town and I get 1-2fps.  As soon as they're dead, everything jumps back to 35+

First off, I just want to say hello to everyone. I took a crash course in Morrowind today lol. Spent most of the afternoon d/ling EVERYTHING, then setting everything up, then fixing a couple errors 0_o here and there. Finally, after following a detailed You Tube video with how to adjust all the settings to play a revamped Morrowind, I was given 2-15 FPS. I played with different settings, lower resolutions, etc. Nothing made a huge improvement..... (BTW, I have a 9400GT Nividia, 2.41Ghz dual AMD proc, 2.00 GB RAM) that is until I went back in to the MGEgui. 

1st. Go to the "Tools" tab -> Select Shader Editor, REMOVE all the (1-6) Active Shaders. HDRBloom, God Rays, ETC. -> Save.

 2nd. Select the Distant Land Tab, Uncheck Distant Land box. EXIT.

Now, try your game. I'm running upwards of 90FPS in towns, 100+ in homes, and 60-70 in forrests now!!! You can always go back and try turning misc. things on to suit your tastes, but it's VERY playable and extremely fast to play like this. Load times decreased DRAMATICALLY as well. I'm running at a very high 1920x1080 and everything still looks very nice. So, if you're in a pinch to get it at a playable FPS, try what I just suggested, with the option to then gradually turn some things back on for personal tastes. Hope this helps! 

EDIT: I had turned off Update shader, and both Supply shaders and HDR under the MISC. Tab in MGE as well. 

I just went back and turned on the Distant Land Tab, but lowered it to 2.0 Cells and unchecked Use Distant Statics and it was very playable. Again, I hope this helps someone as I read other posts where similar issues were arising, but fear not you can play this nice looking game without a monster of a Graphics card.

This thread is about MorrOBLIVION, not MorroWIND.