I just tried it and it didn't help much. The opening was much smoother though. I thought for a minute it was going to work.

Looks like dtgreene bailed out of the thread the same time I did. :( No, winetricks itself is installed. It's actually a script to manage different Wine overrides, works around some Wine bugs, manages other Wine settings, etc. Now that you have the script you can use it to enable specific "winetricks", e.g. some of what dtgreene listed.
First stop when using Wine is the . It can be outdated or may be incomplete for some things, but it's a good starting place. Looking at most of the entries for [url=https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=1015]Morrowind, older ones btw, I wouldn't start off with more than d3dx9, corefonts, tahmoa. In your case:

Regarding Arx Fatalis, try installing Arx Libertatis (The Arx engine was open-sourced and got natively ported to Linux) to cut out the overhead of having Wine translate DirectX to OpenGL.

Also, for stuff without a native engine port (check the GOXMixes sidebar on the game's catalogue page for an easy way to find them), try using Tools > Manage Wine Versions in PlayOnLinux to install a -staging or -CSMT variant of whatever Wine version the game is running under, then using "Configure" on the game and picking that new version from the "Wine version" drop-down box.

(Wine's currently in the process of moving the DirectX-to-OpenGL translation into its own thread so it can take better advantage of multiple cores, but, because they haven't yet got the application compatibility back up to par, it's not in the mainline builds.)

... or install both, Arx Fatalis AND Arx Libertatis, to find out if one runs noticeably faster than the other - this might tell you (or confirm) that the emulation environment is the culprit - or not.

I don't understand what that website is supposed to do. There are no instructions and nothing to download. I'm probably just missing something obvious or I'm just not well versed enough in Linux to understand what I'm looking at. As for putting that in the terminal, this is what I get:
WINEPREFIX=/home/david/.PlayOnLinux//wineprefix/TES3_Morrowind_gog winetricks d3dx9 corefonts tahmoa
Executing w_do_call d3dx9
d3dx9 already installed, skipping
Executing w_do_call corefonts
corefonts already installed, skipping
Unknown arg tahmoa
Usage: /usr/bin/winetricks [options] [command|verb|path-to-verb] ...
Executes given verbs. Each verb installs an application or changes a setting.

I assumed that something like that was obvious enough to need not be stated... or, otherwise, that he'd remember the Arx Fatalis experience enough to recognize whether Arx Libertatis produced a significantly better result.

Works flawlessly from what I played. Thank you so much. At least I can play one newer game now. Arx came out the same year as Morrowind too. Maybe there's hope.

Arx Fatalis runs like crap and Arx Libertalis runs great. It's gotta be the emulation thats messing up morrowind.

In that case, you definitely want to try a -staging or -CSMT build of Wine. Morrowind was released in 2002 and the first dual-core x86 chips weren't released until 2005, so, with mainline builds, you basically have Morrowind+Wine filling one of your cores and nothing but the OS and other background tasks on core #2.

Assuming you don't trip over a regression, a build that can let the DirectX-to-OpenGL translation occupy any slack on the second core should really help.

Also, if you don't mind dealing with the odd bug, you could try OpenMW. With the 0.37.0 release, it's been ported to a new, faster 3D engine and, according to the README... (And if it's not fast enough, just wait. They fully admit that there's still optimization to be done.)

How do I do that?

I get 6 to 9 FPS with OpenMW no matter what I do with the settings. I can turn everything all the way down and it doesn't even go up one frame per second.

Just to confirm, you did try OpenMW 0.37.0, right? (That's both the absolute newest release and the first version to have the new engine)

As for trying a -staging or -CSMT build:

If you're not using PlayOnLinux, then follow these instructions.

If you are using PlayOnLinux (which I recommend even if you don't use its scripts so you can give each game a different Wine version for maximum compatibility if you need to), I briefly skimmed over the instructions back in this post:

1. Open PlayOnLinux
2. Use "Tools > Manage Wine Versions" to install a -staging or -CSMT variant as close as possible to the version you're already using with Morrowind.
3. Select Morrowind and click the "Configure" button
4. Choose the Wine version you just downloaded from the "Wine version" dropdown box
5. If you're not running the latest version of PlayOnLinux, manually choose "Tools > Close all PlayOnLinux Software" (If you are running the latest version, it'll do it for you)

Well, it wasn't in the form of an easy-to-recognize list before, so that's excusable.

I'd experiment to see if i can come up with any more useful advice for you, but all of my machines use nVidia discrete graphics with the three that run games being:

1. A triple-head Lubuntu/Kubuntu hybrid box running a GeForce GTX750
2. A repurposed Lenovo machine running an AGP GeForce 6200 with the copy of WinXP that came pre-installed
3. A 133MHz AST Adventure 210 dual-booting Win3.11 and Win98 with a motherboard implementing an early enough revision of the PCI spec that it refuses to boot if I stick my old Voodoo3 in the only PCI slot on the board.

I doubt any results I could derive from that selection would be relevant to your uses.

I appreciate the help. I'll continue to mess with it and see what happens.

You start by searching for the Windows game you are going to install, e.g. Morrowind. On Morrowind's entry you see several different versions of the game listed, note some games will have a different edition as a separate entry. You find the version you are installing or one closest to it. Then it lists the different tests people have entered for the application with the Wine version used and what results are rated as. The selected test result shows what they tested, what problems they encountered and what they needed to do to get the game running (winetricks, etc.). The left most column on "Test Results" will allow you to show older tests.
The last ones a typo, but it's just another font. The d3dx9 was the important, performance related one. Depending on how you used POL it may not have gotten installed.
Since it is installed the problem is looking to be crappy driver support for your GPU or possible Mesa issue with the game engine. I also have an NVidia card and don't have any real experience with the Intel drivers or different Mesa versions. AFAIK, there is a PPA with the latest/newer Mesa versions. It's possible to break X when trying them though which means no GUI. You would want to exercise care if you go that route.

I might be giving up on it. Kinda sucks but I don't know what else to do.

I just tried Neverwinter Nights and it runs with no problem at all. I guess that will be my go to since I've never beaten it.