Morrowind is getting slower over time...

I've got one word to describe Morrowind "memory leak." I've seen this happen before, make sure you patch to the newest version, that takes care of a lot of these types of bugs.

if u patched t he game already and did the other things u have tried id say try some other drivers if u dont like them just uninstall them the same way you would any others and use regcleaner its a free program easy to use and just remove anything pertaining to ati in there if that doesnt help u may want not lot windows make its own swap file and make a permanent one for virtual memory i leave mine at 512 512 if that dont help try restoring ur sysem u may have something running in the background or thats turning it self on while playing the game

Hmm, even on my ti4600 I get very low framerates in Balmora... Try turning the shadows down and the bring the view distance closer. Were you getting really high framerates when the laptop was new? You might have some software running that is slowing things down.

I would recommend just some general cleanup things... Do a registry cleanup as was recommended above. Check through your add/remove programs list and make sure nothing is installed that you do not wish to be installed. You might also try getting Memturbo2... the free trial is pretty functional (although time limited.... but this doesn't matter because we only want to try and see if it helps). Memturbo will clear out your RAM of any memory resident programs (for example, Windows Media Player, once it has been opened, it takes up the ram it used for the rest of the time that the computer is on, lol, or something along those lines. It's annoying as heck). When I use memturbo, it frees like 100 megs of my 512 each time (assuming I've had the computer on and used some programs). Try that just before you open the game. Also, make sure "wait for vertical sync" is unchecked in your ATI settings... that slows things down a lot on my laptop I noticed (it's not a sager, but it's an ATI M7, close enough to an M9 :-) lol). Have you installed any service packs/updates for windows that might have caused this to start happening? Also, try using other drivers, but to be honest, if you had good results with these drivers initially, the only reason you'd need different drivers would be if you have something that conflicts with your current ones (something you installed since you first played Morrowind with great results). That's why I asked about updates for windows. Defraging is a great idea as well, but you already did that. And yes, having your swap file on a different physical drive from Windows is a great idea. Just make sure windows actually put it there... sometimes if you don't click the enable changes button or whatever it is called in there, it doesn't make the changes. I'll try and think of other things if I can... hope these help some though! Let us know...

Habib

Investorguy, your Morrowind scores seem pretty good based on your last post. 20fps in Balmora is pretty decent, nothing out of the ordinary. The only way you can be sure things are slowing down is by turning on the frame counter (not sure how but let me know if you figure it out) and walk around, you should never hit over 40fps outdoors unless you are right up againt a wall. The Radeon 9k is a good chip but it's simply not the high end right now and Morrowind tends to push the system pretty hard.

I think the FPS counter is displayed by putting "Show FPS=1" in the morrowind ini file in the general section.

I get higher framerates than that, but still, are you sure the view distance hasn't got increased somehow?

NS

I don't know... the only thing about the M9 chip that isn't high end is that it's not 128 megs of vram... 64 is great though. Yeah, if you want to compare it to the GeForceFX, lol, you're nuts. Something like that won't be in a laptop for a while. The main trouble mobile cards have is with memory... textures take up the most memory, so you might want to check how much texture memory the M9 has and make sure your texture settings are below that... High texture settings kill framerate quite rapidly if they go beyond the card's abilities. I haven't played Morrowind so I don't know what the settings interface is... Some games specify texture sizes (32 meg textures, 64 meg textures, etc) and some use a slider. I would adjust it from the top down slowly with all other settings at max and see what happens... that would at least tell you if it's because of the texture memory.

Habib

Read this post...

http://www.sagerforums.com/forums/sh...=&threadid=155

It will help with getting the C drivers.

Habib

PS: You should be able to do a search for the driver name and find them somewhere. Otherwise Nightshade should run by this and give his input.

Actually, the drivers I am using now are the 6200 so I recommend using them, as with the 6200C you have to either hack the drivers yourself or force them to use a similar card, whereas the 6200's support thre M9. Just forgot to update my sig =)

NS

You have any benchmarks with those drivers to maybe compare them with other results? That would be sweet to see.

Habib

I got 7743 on 3dMark2k1SE with defaults if thats anything to go by, but that is MY system

NS

HOLY SHPHINKTERMUFFIN... that's high. Lol, of course it is your system... :-) Do you have the card overclocked or anything? Defaults on 3dmark with that score is sweet. Wow. Did you tweak the system (hardware or software) in any other ways?

Habib