Jyggalagpuff's OpenMW Performance Optimizations

Morrowind is old! Even on modern PC's it can still chug like an old beat up junk car. But not any longer! I have spent years troubleshooting the best settings for me to make the game truly run smooth, to the point where the only observable stutter I get is when changing a cell. Now, I can barely notice any lag or stutter at all. Why do my settings work? Well, in some cases I don’t know, there’s no one setting fix all. But what I can say is that through much trial and error I have found these setting combinations orchestrate together in such a way that simply address Morrowind’s issues. Some of the main issues Morrowind faces are related to the following engine-side variables:

1) Raycasting

2) Pathfinding

2) onHit processing

3) Animation state machine(s)

4) Ai/script loading

5) Asset loading

6) Sound and music processing

My settings are tailored to optimize and work around these aspects of the game engine. And some of my strategies merely mask the issues, i.e. the motion blur effect. I have also included all the animation nif's and kf's that I find have the best performance. You can of course try editing the settings, but I cannot guarantee they will not drop your performance again. For example, my presets take a few rather extreme measures, disabling both combat music and all shadows, and setting landscape view distance to 1. 5x. In my opinion, combat music is unnecessary and the lag that can be caused by it is more immersion breaking than missing out on the music, and shadows in Morrowind aren't that great anyway. Your ground textures already have shadows baked into them, and I also compensate with SSAO and HDR. A lot of times shadows don't even make sense anyway, like why are there shadows during overcast?? Trust me, give it a try and you won't miss them, or the performance issue either! :D

*Also recommended to convert your sound, music, and meshes folders into bsa’s (textures didn’t seem to make a difference). Add the lines “fallback-archive=sound.bsa” “fallback-archive=music.bsa” and “fallback-archive=meshes.bsa” to your openmw.cfg too. And try turning off water refraction, and only use "World" for water reflections at most. Check the "PCSettingsPics" folder for all my general PC settings. If you've already installed the "momw-post-processing-pack" then you probably don't need mine, just the shaders.yaml.

For reference my PC specs tested:

RTX 4060 ti

32gb DDR5 4800Mhz (XMP profile 1 enabled in BIOS)

165Hz Monitor (GSYNC enabled)

2000dpi Mouse

Ryzen 7 9800X3D (X3D Gaming Mode enabled in BIOS)

32gb DDR5 5200Mhz (A-XMP profile 1 enabled in BIOS)

120Hz LG C2 TV (Freesync enabled)

2000dpi Mouse

(Best hardware for performance so far)

32gb DDR5 5600

120Hz LG C2 TV

2000dpi Mouse