Performance decreases after travelling
I know this was recently marked closed, but it still occurs on my system. After travelling around in game (especially across multiple cities), the performance in areas is lower than at the beginning of the session; after restarting the game in the same location, the framerate increases around 10-20 frames, with higher draw and GPU Cull values on the save before restarting. Quick loading does not fix this; only by completely restarting the game does the framerate improve in the location.
This is on the Windows version of the newest build of OpenMW (Revision: 9f302525), but occurs on the .48 and .47 builds as well. It also happens with both higher-end settings and with default settings on a completely vanilla setup.
Here are some screenshots of the before and after of restarting the save (this one with no mods and no settings changed):
Before Restart:
After Restart:
This performance difference is more apparent with more demanding settings:
Before Restart:
After Restart:
To replicate this, I loaded a save at Seyda Neen, took the Silt Strider to Balmora and then Vivec. Then I took the boat in Vivec to Tel Branora, then to Sadrith Mora and to the market area in the image. Then I restarted the game and loaded the save in the market. While this performance difference is not a major issue here, in more demanding areas (like TR's Andothren), restarting can increase framerate noticeably.
This performance difference does not seem to occur on vanilla Morrowind, so I think it's something with OpenMW. I don't think it's a problem with settings (as the default settings have the same issue), and turning off Navmesh Generation does not fix this issue. Changing preload cell cache min and max to 0 and 1, respectively, and the cache delay to 1 does not remove this issue, so I don't think it's something to do with memory (I have 32gbs anyway). Neither does the frametime number affect this: I waited around to increase this number after restarting the save, and the performance did not decrease, so the framerate decrease seems to only be linked to travelling across multiple areas. There seems to be a big difference in the shape instance number, but I'm not sure what that means.
Again, I'm not sure how to solve it (if it easily can), but suggestions are appreciated!