Increasing Performance by Reducing Shadows : V

» Sat Feb 08, 2014 10:03 am

Quite recently, I have been reading around and learned that shadows are among the biggest offenders when it comes to FPS stutters.

Can anyone suggest to me a safe method in which to adjust the shadows? And by that, I mean which .ini settings to tweak along with recommendations?

My PC specs:

Spoiler

GeForce GTX 770 w/ 2GB of VRAM
8GB of RAM
AMD A10 6800K @ 4.1 GHz (Many thanks to the person who gave me this recommendation.)

» Sat Feb 08, 2014 5:47 am

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/283/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/19632/?

try these guides

» Sat Feb 08, 2014 8:14 am

The SAFEST and most user-friendly way is to not mess with INIs and just use the game's default launcher. Use one of the graphics presets depending on your system's capabilities, then click Advanced and manually set the Shadow Detail setting to something lower. For example, on my system, the Ultra preset is perfectly alright (50 FPS average) but I have to notch down shadows to High because shadows on Ultra is just too taxing for my computer.

EDIT: Also, shadows on Ultra is kind of pointless because while I can see shadows drawn further, the tradeoff is the shadow map gets blocky. I'd rather have mid-range but crisp shadows.