@Capostrophic: I just installed the latest nightly and the performance does seem better, thanks. I've got the tile loading set to 1 with distant terrain turned on and it seems pretty smooth on 1600 x 900 and looks great.
AnyOldName3 wrote:A few years ago, three years was very old for a GPU. However, Nvidia have realised that they can make more money by not releasing new GPUs very often and charging more for them when they do, so there's only one generation of cards that's newer, and none aim for the same price point as the GTX 1050. That might be why you thought your card was getting old when it kind of isn't.
Ok, that's interesting and quite surprising. I have to admit I haven't done much shopping around for GPUs since I bought this one. Nvidia isn't the only GPU company though - they must have quite a dominant position in the market, if they can afford to just sit back and release new product at their leisure like that. I imagine it must also be affecting new game development, if consumers aren't upgrading their hardware as often as in the past?
AnyOldName3 wrote:Part of the reason why a decent modern GPU can't do as much as you'd hope in OpenMW with long draw distances is that things were done pretty differently twenty years ago when Morrowind was being made. Things like long draw distances weren't a concern as no computer that existed could handle them, and things that seemed like good ideas or not to matter one way or the other on the hardware that existed at the time often don't scale well. There are some things OpenMW can do about this but doesn't yet, and other things it won't ever be able to do. Overall, things should get better over time.
Ok, thanks for the info, that's very enlightening. This probably isn't a contender for original idea of the week, but couldn't it be possible to load up just the structures and larger vegetation for the more distant tiles, without the smaller stuff, creatures, items, etc? I'm sure doing it is easier said than done though. Anyway, it's great to hear that there are some things in the pipeline to improve performance with larger draw distances and I look forward very much to seeing the future releases.
Again, sorry if I come across as critical. I think the engine is really awesome and seems a lot better than the original one. I was experiencing a lot of frustrating crashes with the original on my machine recently, but OpenMW seems a lot more stable