Simple FPS Optimizer (MWSE)

There is now a newer, more sophisticated solution: Dynamic FPS Optimization - modifies View Distance at runtime based on framerate or user defined parameters, whereas this one lowers View Distance to minimum in exteriors.

You might also want to check MSOC - Occlusion Culling for MWSE.

For OpenMW I recommend Dynamic View Distance (FPS Boost).

For some reason, MGE XE overwrites your View Distance settings by always bumping it to maximum, which appears to be the biggest FPS hog. It seems to have a bigger impact than any of the settings, even MGE's Distant Land doesn't come close.

The ancient Morrowind FPS Optimizer doesn't work for me, so I made my own in MWSE.

In my case, decreasing the View Distance rewards me with +20-30 FPS, at the expense of occasional mirages. If you don't care about objects changing in front of you as you get closer it might be worth the trade-off. MGE's Distant Land will instead be rendered close to you, so regenerating detailed Distant Land is recommended, as well as decreasing the minimum size of distant statics, i.e. Near = 50, Far = 100, Very Far = 150. From my experience, turning up Distant Land settings doesn't harm FPS that much and reduces the amount of mirages.

For best performance vs visual quality balance you'd have to experiment with Distant Land and static sizes yourself. Depending on your rig, larger min. static sizes might add few more FPS, but from a certain point things might look weird, i.e. from a distance you'll see houses without door (this happens with default static size of 200). Personally, I prefer to see small statics, so it makes up for the decreased Distance View and for me it doesn't impact FPS much anyway. I also play with a quite big FoV, which makes the short Distance View subjectively not that short, because visually everything moves further from you.

This mod will only work if your View Distance is set to minimum or maximum value (default when using MGE XE and resetted every time you restart the game), so if you change the View Distance in options yourself, it won't work.

This means that if you want to temporarily disable this mod, pull the View Distance slider in options to any value in the middle.

Installation

Just unpack to game's main folder. Run the game. Go outside. Enjoy more FPS.

Optional, but recommended

Regenerate Distant Land (go through "Distant land generator wizard" in MGE XE settings) with cranked up settings and smaller statics to reduce mirages. If you decrease min. static sizes you might start seeing from a distance objects that are in fact no longer there, like levitating crates from the CharGen ship, after the ship has already sailed. Include 'CharGen Ship Crates Overrides' when generating statics to get ri