OpenMW performance vs Vanilla+MCP - are there any benchmarks/comparisons?

[ChillinBeach]

As that sounds like something could be done about it.. this is actually the answer i wanted to hear.
It seems like i should step up my miserable C++ skills to support you instead of complaining.

[nwah]

Some thoughts:

Try compiling OpenMW yourself, but tune the compiler options for your specific AMD processor. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTc2NDg

When compiling, try using pre-releases of OpenSceneGraph (OSG). Last I heard, OpenMW successfully compiled with them. https://github.com/openscenegraph/OpenSceneGraph (Out of my suggestions, this one would probably have the best cost-benefit ratio)

Scrawl had previously maintained a fork of OSG with some OpenMW-specific tweaks that weren't being allowed upstream, but it is probably out of date. You could see if any of his tweaks could be ported to the latest OSG code. https://github.com/scrawl/osg

If you use any mods with complicated meshes, you could try to make sure they are optimized using PyFFI. Morrowind meshes tend to be simple and thus don't get much benefit from PyFFI, so that is more of an Oblivion trick. But I think it would help at least a little bit, even on the default meshes within the bsa files, and it could definitely impact mods. http://pyffi.sourceforge.net/

To run PyFFI on the vanilla meshes, you'd need to use a BSA unpacker, then recursively run PyFFI on the whole thing. http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/12189/

Speaking of BSAs, I remember that some people in the Oblivion community believed that unpacking BSAs alone would improve performance, since they wouldn't need to be uncompressed all the time. http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:BSA_ ... timization

[akortunov]

I remember that some people in the Oblivion community believed that unpacking BSAs alone would improve performance

Or wouldn't, especially if you have an HDD onstead of SSD. In this case a random access to a lot of small files would be much slower than access to single large file. And anyway this trick should affect only mostly loading time, not FPS.

You could see if any of his tweaks could be ported to the latest OSG code.

IIRC, this branch was backported from 3.5 to 3.4 due to bugs and memory leaks in development OSG 3.5. IMO, we should wait the next OSG (3.6?) stable release.

[ChaoticTabris]

I remember that some people in the Oblivion community believed that unpacking BSAs alone would improve performance

Or wouldn't, especially if you have an HDD onstead of SSD. In this case a random access to a lot of small files would be much slower than access to single large file. And anyway this trick should affect only mostly loading time, not FPS.

I can confirm it's a bad idea for people with HDD. Some Skyrim modding guides recommend BSA extraction and on my computer it caused ridiculously long load times and problem loading new cells as i moved.

[Pherim]

I remember that some people in the Oblivion community believed that unpacking BSAs alone would improve performance

Or wouldn't, especially if you have an HDD onstead of SSD. In this case a random access to a lot of small files would be much slower than access to single large file. And anyway this trick should affect only mostly loading time, not FPS.

I can confirm it's a bad idea for people with HDD. Some Skyrim modding guides recommend BSA extraction and on my computer it caused ridiculously long load times and problem loading new cells as i moved.

Yes, because reading the single, uncompressed files takes much longer than decompressing them. The idea is that CPU load is reduced by not having to uncompress the files, but it doesn't work like this, as decompressing is at least five to ten times faster than reading from HDD, depending on the particular hardware.

[JohnZ]

You could see if any of his tweaks could be ported to the latest OSG code.

IIRC, this branch was backported from 3.5 to 3.4 due to bugs and memory leaks in development OSG 3.5. IMO, we should wait the next OSG (3.6?) stable release.

3.5.5 should be usable for openmw again, at least all the bugs from earlier 3.5.x releases seem to be fixed.

[nwah]

Latest tagged OSG is 3.5.7

[nwah]

For HDD users, you could unpack the BSAs, replace all the vanilla files with desired mod files. Run PyFFI over everything. Then re-pack it all as a BSA. Then your HDD won't need to seek even on mod files.

[nwah]

I also remember there were ways to recompress textures to faster formats, but I suppose this might also affect load times more than anything.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801/

[Pherim]

For HDD users, you could unpack the BSAs, replace all the vanilla files with desired mod files. Run PyFFI over everything. Then re-pack it all as a BSA. Then your HDD won't need to seek even on mod files.

True, but that's quite a lot of work... Skyrim supports using BSAs for replacers, but Oblivion doesn't and I'm not sure about Morrowind but I guess it's the same as Oblivion.

I also remember there were ways to recompress textures to faster formats, but I suppose this might also affect load times more than anything.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801/

Yes, that can be useful with badly optimized textures... there are still many older mods around which use wrongly compressed or even uncompressed textures (sometimes even in other formats than .dds), so using this tool may help reduce loading times and memory usage, but it also won't really affect performance in most cases except possibly reduce stuttering.