OpenMW or vanilla engine for low-spec laptop

[JustAWhisper]

I'm stuck on a low-spec laptop for several weeks and I've been poking around for interesting things to play. I want to give Morrowind a try but as it's super old I anticipated needing some fixes to run on a modern machine and quickly stumbled across the OpenMW vs vanilla engine debate.

I managed to find some anecdotal evidence that OpenMW may actually run worse on low spec machines than vanilla, but I couldn't find any serious investigation of the issue.

I'm running a fairly modern Windows 10 laptop with a 1.8GHz quad-core CPU but integrated graphics and only 8GB of RAM.

Thoughts on where to start initially?

[Lobo de hielo]

You know you can run both side by side. Then choose which suits you and your laptop best.
OpenMW when you first start it will ask you to point to the base morrowind files as data sources, but other than that it keeps to itself.

Important, the save file formats are incompatible between OpenMW and vanilla. So, you will have to have different saves between the installations. Knowing this just play 10 to 15 minutes with each and then choose.

[^4Steel ^1Jackal^2~FYANB~]

just use openmw, i have a windows xp laptop i use for older games and it runs openmw just as well as my modern desktop.

openmw has plenty of advantages over the base game, so the only reason to use the base game is if you want to use a graphics enhancement mod thats not compatable with openmw

[theo]

This is not a low spec laptop

[Minari99]

Originally posted by theo:

This is not a low spec laptop

Yeah, 4GB RAM would be even lower

[MisterSmellies]

openmw will always give you more fps per draw distance.