Problem setting priority to "high" and Affinity to "1"

[TackySlime]

PLEASE HELP ME, I've been at it for hours trying to get morrowind to run at an acceptable performance on steam!! Whenever I run this game, it automatically sets the priority to "normal" and the affinity to "All Processors". What we want is to set it to "CPU 1" and priority "high", but every edit I make in Task Manager is reset each time morrowind is closed. Likewise, I CANNOT make a shortcut forcing the command because morrowind on steam only opens up the launcher and not the actual Morrowind.exe. It seems virtually impossible to open up morrowind, directly.

I've had morrowind on this PC installed on disc, and with these changes made - it runs in aces. It sucks that steam is basically penalizing me for the convenience of having it downloaded. Are there any workarounds to this, any other way to make morrowind on steam run in "high" priority and with only 1 CPU affinity?

[TackySlime]

I have an Nvidia graphics card, by the way. Is it possible to force morrowind to run with only 1 CPU in any of the nvidia software?

[Asus]

You can force Affinity "1" by making a .bat

Example for a 4 core cpu on Win 10:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /C start "" /affinity 8 "C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Morrowind\Morrowind.exe"

Save as MWStart.bat and put it your Morrowind directory. Run the .bat.

NOTE: "C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Morrowind\Morrowind.exe" is just an example of where your Morrowind.exe might be located. It could be: S:\Steam\steamapps\common\Morrowind\Morrowind.exe

You can look up the hexadecimal specific to your needs here [www.binaryhexconverter.com]

For Windows 7 it would be: C:\Windows\System\cmd.exe

[TackySlime]

Originally posted by Quantanamo:

Originally posted by TackySlime:

I have an Nvidia graphics card, by the way. Is it possible to force morrowind to run with only 1 CPU in any of the nvidia software?

Make a shortcut to the Morrowind.exe itself with that command.

Even then, why the hell do you want to run on Affinity set to 1 and priority to High? This game is 15 years old, it can practically run on anything now. The last one isn't needed, and the first would actually make the game run worse.

I couldn't make a shortcut, morrowind on steam is designed in a way that necessitates opening up the launcher. Whenever you try to make a shortcut to the exe, it just opens the launcher.

The reason why you'll want to run it on less cores is because the engine was made with only 1 in mind. As for the performance, a lot of people have performance issues running morrowind, even on high-end computers. The engine is just not optimized well for most of today's tech.

[Asus]

Originally posted by TackySlime:

Originally posted by Quantanamo:

Make a shortcut to the Morrowind.exe itself with that command.

Even then, why the hell do you want to run on Affinity set to 1 and priority to High? This game is 15 years old, it can practically run on anything now. The last one isn't needed, and the first would actually make the game run worse.

I couldn't make a shortcut, morrowind on steam is designed in a way that necessitates opening up the launcher. Whenever you try to make a shortcut to the exe, it just opens the launcher.

The reason why you'll want to run it on less cores is because the engine was made with only 1 in mind. As for the performance, a lot of people have performance issues running morrowind, even on high-end computers. The engine is just not optimized well for most of today's tech.

Or you can try my way. It works. It's an old tutorial I made for Crysis years ago. It will force Windows to use just 1 CPU core.

[TackySlime]

I did manage to resolve the issue. I downloaded Prio which permanently saves your affinity and priority settings. I gained a pretty substantial performance gain, but for some reason it still doesn't run quite as well as it does on the disc version.

[Asus]

Glad you got it to work. My way still would have worked for you though.

[TackySlime]

Originally posted by Asus:

Glad you got it to work. My way still would have worked for you though. :dealwithit:

I appreciate your help. I'll keep it in mind for future steam games that work better with 1 core.

[Asus]

Originally posted by TackySlime:

Originally posted by Asus:

Glad you got it to work. My way still would have worked for you though.

I appreciate your help. I'll keep it in mind for future steam games that work better with 1 core.