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Thread: Shadows and the FPS hit in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 2011
    Posts
    56

    Shadows and the FPS hit in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

    Shadows in various games had a major impact always on the FPS (Frames per Second). So here I had tried a few thing to fix the issue and I am sure enough that this is going to fix things. I am going to give a bit handful of settings here. This will be helpful for those who want to fix the fps issue of the game. And it is also better if you can share your settings.
    iShadowMapResolution=xxx
    This setting is related to the quality of shadows in game. And this put a major impact on the fps. If you keep this high then the game output will be slower. A setting of 8192 here can reduce to 4096 which can help you to achieve more fps. In conjunction with the above setting, the "fShadowDistance=xxx.xxx" is critical. Obviously this affects the 'range' that Shadows can be seen.

    Unfortunately, lower the ShadowMapResolution setting, you can see more 'shadow shimmering'. This is not going to affect your gameplay. Shadow shimmering is particularly bothersome to some. Here you can go to iBlurDeferredShadowMask=x and make it proper to some extent. This affects the crispness of the edge of shadow. A low setting will give a crisp edge whereas a high setting (such as 9) will make it blur. Any changes in this setting does not seem to affect performance.

    Using a combination of these settings, a player can run the game more properly on old system also. Fast fps means good gaming output. A player with a better system can achieve high quality shadows with a good I want good shadows and my system is of medium to good quality, so I have opted for the following settings:
    IBlurDeferredShadowMask=4 (Gone for some blur on the close up edges)
    fShadowDistance=2000.0000 (I want a decent quality shadow so I have lowered the distance).
    ShadowMapResolution=4096 (This is as high as I can go for Shadow quality).


    It should be noted that none of the settings below seemed to have much impact on performance or Shadow Quality:
    iShadowFilter
    iShadowMaskQuarter
    iShadowMode
    iShadowSplitCount
    iShadowMapResolutionSecondary
    iShadowMapResolutionPrimary
    fShadowLODStartFade
    fShadowBiasScale=0.2500 (Although this should be left as is, changing this has strange effects on the shadows)


    I would be interested to hear about your experiences.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
    Posts
    1,239
    I can confirm that increasing iShadowMapResolution=2048 increases the resolution, This greatly reduce the blocky/staircase effect around shadows however it has a significant impact on performance. I is right to say taht higher shadow map resolution results in horrible performance. 4096 is pretty rough on my system. I have to keep it set at 2048 if I want to keep everything smooth.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jul 2011
    Posts
    1,267
    These settings do have a large effect on performance especially indoors near any light source. I also can’t stress enough how much ShadowMaskQuarter has to do with it all. Set it to 1 then set it to 4 and see for yourself with Fraps FPS running. The iBlurDeferredShadowMask is what I found to be the best fix for shadows. The more 'shadow shimmering' will be visible during sun movement cycles" (shadows movement BUG) can be fixed with Skyrim.ini
    [Display]
    fSunShadowUpdateTime=-1.0000
    fSunUpdateThreshold=-0.5000

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jul 2011
    Posts
    1,345
    I have my Shadow resolution set at 2048 with a 4K draw distance, equivalent to the baseline High setting for Shadows in the Launcher. Ultra sets the resolution to 4096 and the draw distance to 8K, but since the Shadows are CPU rendered, this obviously comes with a fairly huge performance issue. There is a major difference. The one in the steam folder is irrelevant and changing it does nothing to your game.

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