Is optimization limited?

[didgeridont]

I have followed OpenMW for a few years now and been playing Morrowind for a lot longer. A big reason I don't play Morrowind anymore is that it lags and crashes very bad with lots of mods. OpenMW has always been perfectly stable but has also had similar bad lag if you play with mods. For example I just updated to 0.46 and with shadows, water shader, and a few texture mods, I'm still looking at 20 FPS in Balmora. Now I read in another thread that the reason for this is because of Morrowind's very unoptimized assets.

My question is does this basically mean OpenMW's future will always be limited by Morrowind's assets? I mean I always go overboard in Bethesda games with mods and particularly graphics mods. But Morrowind still looks ancient even with mods while still having terrible performance. I really like the work done here and I actually prefer the Morrowind gameplay over Skyrim's but I look forward to Skywind's completion than OpenMW because I know it will looks good and run well on Skyrim SE's well optimized engine.

But then I had the idea that if Skywind has new optimized assets is there a way to import them in OpenMW and replace Morrowind's vanilla assets? I remember that thread here about replacing all of Morrowind's assets that never went anywhere. To me it looks like Skywind has already done that. Perhaps a deal could be worked out?

[CMAugust]

In all the time Morrowind has existed, it's only been very recently that the modding community has paid any attention to things like draw cost. The two biggest mods to address this, Morrowind Optimization Patch and Project Atlas, are less than 3 years old. Those mods only touch a fraction of Morrowind meshes and textures, though it's hoped more will come in time. And in the future 0.47.0 release, OpenMW will be doing even more magic stuff under the hood that will speed up even the original unoptimal assets. So to answer your question, no, OpenMW will not always be limited by Morrowind's assets; especially when future content creators have a better understanding about what makes an efficient asset.