Low FPS in towns on macOS/Apple silicon

[merc1er]

I am getting down to 20 FPS in towns on an M1 Pro with my settings as described in the "performance tips" section of modding-openmw. I tried installing the optimization patch but it doesn't seem to change anything.

Did anyone achieve consistent performance on Apple silicon? I am getting constant max FPS (set to 120) outside of towns.

[psi29a]

Any examples (which towns)?

Do you have Object Paging and Active Grid enabled? (both should be on for added performance).

Morrowind's assets are pretty crappy really hamper the draw call, enabling the above allows some special sauce to help optimise this.

Keep in mind that OpenMW uses OpenGL which is deprecated and no longer maintained, in addition to this, is run on top of Metal via a translation layer. Which can be an additional source of issues not found on Intel macs.

[merc1er]

Pretty much every town/city. It is most noticeable in Balmora, some forts, some parts of Vivec.

It looks like Object Paging Active Grid was already active, but Object Paging min size was set to 0. However, increasing this value to the default (0.01) or 0.03 did not have any impact on performance.

Right, I understand the limitations of the infrastructure and different CPU architecture. Note that the game is still completely playable, as it rarely goes below 30 FPS, and even ~25 FPS remains playable (I think it was running at this framerate on original xbox hardware anyway).

[psi29a]

Not sure if it helps, but I currently play with low-resolution water shader and shadow as those are the largest hits for me.