TL;DR - It was with editing the settings.cfg and a good bunch of performance mods.


Start with my usual base line performance mods: Morrowind Optimization Patch[www.nexusmods.com], Better Meshes plus Optimization[www.nexusmods.com], and Project Atlas[www.nexusmods.com]. These will give a nice FPS bump as your baseline.

There's a Settings.CFG file that OpenMW uses. It's similar to the Skyrim.INI and SkyrimPrefs.INI files like you'd see for Skyrim but for OpenMW. This is the more advanced stuff. So follow along carefully.


1. Open this folder:
Documents\My Games\OpenMW


2. There will be a file called "settings.cfg" and make a backup of it. Then open it in Notepad.


3. Once opened, find the [Camera] section, and look for the "small feature culling pixel size" entry. Change that line to the following:

small feature culling pixel size = 8.0


4. Go to the [Cells] section and find "preload num threads." Change it to this:

preload num threads = 2


5. Find "preload fast travel" and change it to this:

preload fast travel = true


6. Find "pointers cache size" and change it to this:

pointers cache size = 80


7. Go to the [Terrain] section and find "object paging min size." Change it to this:

object paging min size = 0.05


8. Save the file and close Notepad.


9. (Important!) (If you don't know what OpenMW Player is then you can ignore this.)

If you use Kezyma's OpenMW Player for Mod Organizer 2, make sure you IMPORT THESE EDITED SETTINGS FROM THE MO2 PLUGIN'S MENU!!!! OpenMW Player will overwrite these edits otherwise.

For reference, my specs: 1050Ti, i5-3470, 12GB RAM, 2TB SATA SSD.

With this set-up, I tend to get me between 50 and 60 FPS around Balmora.

If you have issues, you can always revert to that backup of the settings.cfg I told you to make, so don't worry! Anyway I hope this helps you like it's helped me!