help with Morrowind memory leak, please

[Helkoid]

Hi, I am having a problem with Morrowind, and I can't seem to find a solution. I've researched it on the net, and others are calling it a memory leak, but there doesn't seem to be many of us that suffer from it. This is the only game of mine that this happens with too. What happens is that the game gradually slows down (more and more frequent loading time, screen freezes for increasing intervals up to several seconds, framerates still stay up though--besides the freezing). Hard drive activity is good at the beginning(quickly loads when it first starts), then gradually goes down to almost nothing when it's loading a new area (the light doesn't blink much at all...you can tell that it's not reading much) and the game starts to develop delays of several seconds while the hd takes it's time to load the info.

This takes place as I go from one area to another, say, anytime I go into a new building, new dungeon, new overland area. If I stay within one area, things are fine. But as you probably know, you don't stay in one area long in this game. After a fresh reboot of the computer, I can play for maybe 20 minutes before things get out of hand and quite annoying, sometimes less time than that even. Is there something that I can do to fix this? I've already tweaked my registry, swap file, graphics, new drivers for video, sound, chipset, everything. I even formatted, reinstalled, and tweaked everything fresh.

Here's what I'm running:
Athlon xp1800+
512 DDR
Soundblaster Live!
Radeon 8500 64mb retail
Shuttle AK31A
WinXP Pro sp1 and all available updates
most recent patches for Morrowind

Running it at different resolutions doesn't make a difference, and overclocking only sqeezes out a few more fps when it's not freezing. Also, when I get out of a real laggy game of Morrowind, I can fire up BF:1942 and get good frames with no freezing or lag.

The only thing that I can think of is installing Win98se on another partition of my hd and trying Morrowind out on that...perhaps it's some strange WinXP+my particular setup issue?

Thanks for any help that you give me; I appreciate it.

[AllGamer]

yes, Morrowind is a memory HOG

and 512 Meg of RAM is not going to cut it

you need at least 1024 meg of RAM


i'm using 2 Gig of RAM, and i can play the whole day without problem, because i turned of my PAGEFILE

stupid Morrowind has too much access to the PageFile and slows everything down

so get more ram, dissable PageFile

then play

:t

[Radi0h3ad]

I played thru morrowind with no problems with 512DDR... Only problem I ever had was the occasional crash to desktop, which looking back may very well have been a memory issue, but I think I remember being told it was a video card problem... with a little tweaking of the graphics card, things were OK...

[PacNW CE]

It amazes me that Morrowind, a dx8.1 game, essentially necessitates a dx9 class card to run at high res and AA. Ok, I know that is somewhat subjective, but I have had similar problems running 512mb of memory too. As great a game as it is, I wish Morrowind had been a game developed around dx9.

[Nails9inmyhead]

I played that game with 256 and 512-crashed on both just as often. I upgraded yesterday. In fact, it just crashed that's why I decided to go online. I think the prob is 1. gforce2mx400 2. That game is so buggy.Even the x-box version is full of bugs. Have you read through all of the fixes they have made? Mem leaks were in there. Ive never had it really freeze on me though.Tweakin the card helped, thats all i can say.:(

[Beeblequix]

No, you don't need at least 1024 meg of RAM .

I play MW from my 98se partition with 256 meg. On my XP partition I'd use the hard drive a bit more, and consequently not run as well.

If you play from XP you need 512, not 1.5BILLISILLION Gigs....

If you play from 98se, 256 is fine.

But the best bet is to *defragment your drive* every few days.

And not load anything else at startup.

And check for scumware www.spybot.com .

I run *nicely* along in MW without excessive "at least" hardware requirements.

www.elderscrolls.com under their forums have sections dealing with hardware issues, and you may run into some of my own threads dealing with this.

[$1500-P4 gamer]

I have yet to hear of a game req. or even recomending 1gig of ram. 512mb in XP runs everything I throw at it. And the non -XP friendly games, WinME stomps with 512mb ram.:D

[Nails9inmyhead]

Minimum System Requirements:
* Windows Me/98 128MB RAM
* Windows XP/2000 256MB RAM (Windows NT NOT supported)
* 500mhz Intel Pentium III, Celeron, or AMD Athlon processor.
* 8x CD/DVD-ROM Drive
* 1 GB free hard disk space
* Windows swapfile
* DirectX 8.1 (included)
* 32MB Direct3D Compatible Video card and DirectX 8.1 compatible driver
* DirectX 8.1 Compatible Sound Card
* Keyboard, Mouse

Recommended System Requirements:
* 800mhz or faster Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon
* 256 MB RAM
* Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS, ATI Radeon 7500 or faster video card

Come on AllGamer.

[Beeblequix]

Helkoid,

You hit a good idea of installing 98 on another partition (I did it, and am sooo glad I did). Some games work better on 98 than XP (Deus Ex gets 25% higher framerates, Morrowind with 256Meg gets about 1-2 frames higher,...) and some like Q3 based games work better on XP.

Also, please list the versions of the following drivers that you're using:

1. BIOS
2. 4-in-1's
3. Soundblaster Live!
4. Catalysts

And
5. PLEASE run MSCONFIG and tell us what you're loading at startup.
6. did you run SPYBOT yet?

edit:
7. also, have you enabled DMA mode on your hard drive?

I should postfix my previous statements (especially in light of Nail's official recommendation post) that I meant in a better case scenario XP needs 512 as the swapfile usage IS a MW instability issue. I did run it with 256 meg on the XP side, but had a few CTDs I attribute to swapping(that's why I jumped back to 98 for most gaming). Perhaps the best case is no swapping and running +1G.

ß

edit:

$1500P4Gamer, how is your 8500 handling MW (if applicable)?

[AllGamer]

told you guys Win98 is better for GAMES :D

:t

[BadBadNeil]

speaking of Morrowind and speed. Check out Bloodmoon. Just got it and its lots slower than the normal game or tribunal. I don't know if its the snow or what but I get a lot of loading, many more than in the regular game and its annoying.