I'm trying to play Morrowind on my new (to me) laptop. It's seriously the only game I wanted to play on this thing. The issue is that it runs at around 15 FPS. I have tried to run this game on my old laptop, which is probably as old at the game, and it ran better on that than this newer laptop if I ran it on a lower resolution and windowed. If I ran it at the monitors resolution it had the same problem. I don't see any other issues other than the FPS. Everything is rendering fine.

Intel Core2 Duo T5550 at 1.83 GHz

I believe it has three GBs of RAM.

Intel 965GM

I am also trying to run it on Mint 17.2. Most of the other windows games I've tried have worked fine with no dips in FPS. I'm using PlayonLinux. I've tried FPS Optimizer and it didn't help.

Any advice?

If I cannot get this game running, is there another open world RPG on here or Steam that can keep me busy for a few hundred hours that might be able to run?

You didn't add any of the MODS because those killed the FPS for me.

I go vanilla all the way now with no probs.

Nope. No mods. I figured that would tank the FPS and I don't care about them anyway. I mainly play games on my gaming desktop, I just wanted a character or two on my laptop so I can play when I can't be in the office or use Steam Link.

Are you playing on Linux?

No but my PC is a fossil.

I'm not familiar with Linux, so I can't help you there.
But I can confirm that Morrowind runs fine on MY laptop: XP, 2GHz, 2 GB RAM, and an Intel 965 graphics card just like you. So the hardware shouln't be the issue.
So I guess the issue has to do with Linux, or with how Linux interacts with Morrowind.

What winetricks do you have installed?

I'm new to seriously using linux. How can I tell that?
Version: 1:1.6.2-0ubuntu4 of wine. Thank you so much for that. I thought maybe it was the integrated graphics, so now I know there is hope.

$ winetricks list-installed

(at the command line, of course)

Edit: The output on my system, on which I was able to run Morrowind fine (albeit on a more powerful system than yours):
d3dcompiler_43
d3dx11_43
d3dx9
d3dx9_36
d3dx9_43
devenum
directplay
msvcirt
vcrun2005
wmp9
wsh56vb
wsh57
xact
xact_jun2010

So, I typed in winetricks list-installed and it came back saying it wasn't installed. So, I did sudo apt-get install winetricks and let it do it's thing. I tried the game again and had the same problem. I then tried winetricks list-installed again and it hesitates before putting me back at $

You need to specify the WINEPREFIX otherwise it defaults to ~/.wine. POL creates a separate prefix (Virtual Drive). You will find the one where you installed Morrowind under: ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/. For example: You can also look at the winetricks log file in the prefix directory, ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/miii in my example.

> wine --version
wine-1.8
> POL_WINEVERSION
1.8
> WINEPREFIX
/home/david/.PlayOnLinux//wineprefix/TES3_Morrowind_gog
> Distribution
Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela
> glxinfo \| grep rendering
direct rendering: Yes
> glxinfo \| grep renderer
GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM x86/MMX/SSE2
> OpenGL libs (Direct rendering testing)

That's the only place I see Wineprefix in reference to Morrowind. The other games have prefix folders but not Morrowind.

Sudo apt-get install winetricks did nothing then? It said it was installing when I typed that in.

Like I said, I'm new to gaming on linux. I have a general idea of how the terminal works and how to do some things but this is my first time with wine. Every other game I've installed using PlayonLinux has worked fine except this one.

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
winetricks is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 32 not upgraded.

this is what I see when I retype sudo apt-get

I'm going to uninstall and reinstall and see what that does now that I should have winetricks installed.

Update

I reinstalled using the CDs instead of the GOG installer and it works better. It's still unplayable for me at around 25 FPS, and I also can't install the expansions with the CDs as it doesn't recognize them.

I decided to download and try Arx Fatalis to see if that might work, and the FPS is horrible in that as well. I'm truly amazed that I got a laptop built between 06 and 08 (from what the guy who gave it to me said) and it won't run games that my laptop from around 02 could.

I would upgrade the CPU in this computer, but since there is no guarantee that would help at all I guess I'm just stuck with games from the 90's like I was with my 14 year old laptop.

Anyone else have any ideas on what settings to change in Wine so that I might be able to run this game?

Have you tried OpenMW? https://openmw.org/downloads/