Morrowind 4870x2

[BababooeyHTJ]

I just picked up a 4870x2 to replace my GTX280 (maybe) and I tried out Morrowind heavily modded of course and my framerates are terrible. I'm talking possibly less than half the fps of what I was seeing with my GTX280. Is that normal? I ran GPU Tool for a while with no problems so the card seems fine.

One other question. Should I reinstall my OS? Ive heard of too many problems when going from Nvidia to ATI hardware.

 

[Wrigleyvillain]

I started playing it again heavily modded too and was surprised at low framerates as well. It is very CPU bound I learned. I got it playable though and found it ran a lot smoother and better under Windows 7 64 than XP 32 once I got the MGE and FPS Optimizer difficulties worked out. Stopped dropping FPS very low in certain areas (NPC heavy usually) as well as stopped crashing after about a half hour of play (maybe hitting the address space limit). Single 4870 here.

But you say it ran better with your 280, I tried an 8800GT during my troubleshooting and it didn't make a huge difference so maybe you do have a driver issue. I would also run Riva Tuner HW monitoring to see just whats being used and how much.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Yeah, it's usually NPC heavy areas. It's odd my GTX280 wouldn't dip under 30 or so fps but the X2 would hit under 18 fps. I checked Riva and with or without Cat AI I did see 100% usage but around 70%.

 

[Wrigleyvillain]

Yeah the NPC heavy areas are even more so with LCV and MCA. I too observed about 60-70% GPU usage at any given time. Used both cores of my CPU pretty well for such an old game.

 

[daehxxiD]

Yeah the NPC heavy areas are even more so with LCV and MCA. I too observed about 60-70% GPU usage at any given time. Used both cores of my CPU pretty well for such an old game.

Only because it uses them, doesn't mean it uses them efficiently... In fact, I'd say it uses that horsepower horribly if you consider I could run Morrowind (ok, not modified) like 7 years back, fluidly on an AMD 1700+ with Geforce 4 Ti 4200.

 

[3870x2]

yeah, an old radeon 9800 could run this game flawlessly. Your modifications have the worst optimization i have ever seen since windows vista. Without those optimizations, i could probably pick up about 4000 - 4500 FPS lol.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Only because it uses them, doesn't mean it uses them efficiently... In fact, I'd say it uses that horsepower horribly if you consider I could run Morrowind (ok, not modified) like 7 years back, fluidly on an AMD 1700+ with Geforce 4 Ti 4200.

It seems to scale much better with multi core cpus than Oblivion, but that dosen't really say too much.

I just can't figure out why I took such a hit in performance when going from a GTX280 to a 4870x2. I can't blame the engine for that. I did notice an odd command prompt that just said Nvidia Are you sure y/n after rebooting from uninstalling drivers then booting into safe mode to run driver sweeper and CCleaner.

 

[daehxxiD]

It seems to scale much better with multi core cpus than Oblivion, but that dosen't really say too much.

I just can't figure out why I took such a hit in performance when going from a GTX280 to a 4870x2. I can't blame the engine for that. I did notice an odd command prompt that just said Nvidia Are you sure y/n after rebooting from uninstalling drivers then booting into safe mode to run driver sweeper and CCleaner.

I'm not really sure, but you said that when disabling Cat A.I. you had the same results. Maybe morrowind (or your modded version) just doesn't work in Crossfire... A single 4870 is a tad slower then the GTX 280 me thinks.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

I'm not really sure, but you said that when disabling Cat A.I. you had the same results. Maybe morrowind (or your modded version) just doesn't work in Crossfire... A single 4870 is a tad slower then the GTX 280 me thinks.

Yeah but we are really talking almost half the framerates that I had with the GTX280. I should test a bit more with Cat AI bit diasbling it did seem to make things worse and judging by my Rivatuner readout it seems to be scaling.

 

[DRDNA]

Disabling the AI cripples an ATI card compared to it enabled.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Disabling the AI cripples an ATI card compared to it enabled.

Yeah, this card just sucks. My 280 outperforms it in minimum framerates Oblivion modded as well. Look at the HL2 with the Cenematic mod bench. Just look at the minimum framerates in this thread on the 4870x2 compared to a GTX285 (my 280 overclocks well past 285 speeds). I don't understand the hype on that card. It really is pathetic.

 

[kn00tcn]

who gets CF for a really old game? you need a faster single gpu & faster cpu speeds (instead of more cores) for older games

i dont see anything unusual on the HL2 chart, mins are well past single 4870, 4890, gtx260, & almost the same as gtx275... but that's just mins, there's no line chart over time to see if it's prolongued & there's no average