Is there even a big difference between having everything at high vs having everything at ultra? On this PC I've always had it at Ultra (fully maxed) because Geforce Experience believes it to be "optimal" for my system and I haven't paid much mind to it but then I noticed that shadows are at ultra quality as well.

In my fair opinion, shadows look like [censored] regardless and I've read that people recommend actually dropping it from ultra to say high or medium because shadows are what can kill a relatively good PC FPS wise.

First of all, don't run the Nvidia Experience with the game, that can kill game performance. Second, don't use the Nvidia Control Panel for any post game graphics processing especially AA, that can cause crashes and freezing or flickering textures. Best to not even have it running with the game (this program is not the drivers)

As for Shadows, most people put Shadows at High on otherwise Ultra settings because some think they look a bit better, but for sure they look no worse and it does increase performance. There are some INI tweaks that can be done to the shadows (at the expense of Frame Rates), search the web for those.

Me, I have been playing TES games for so long that I have learned to ignore the shadows in these games (as they always leave something to be desired) Once I stopped looking down, the shadow issues no longer concern me.

I never use Nvidia's control panel. I'm fairly certain I've never opened it on this PC.

While I would prefer Skyrim looking a lot better, I also want it to play well when I summon my minions in the 100+ range and that puts a big strain on my computer.

Completely without any form of graphics mods, I seem to do a fairly stable 60 fps. With the mods I used to have for a long time, I think I pulled around 47 fps and while that is perfectly playable for me, I did however notice a serious decrease in performance when I spawn a certain number of things. Without these mods, I can spawn around 200-250 draugr in one place before my pc goes haywire and with the mods I can only do around 100-150.

I haven't yet tried if I can do EVEN more with having it all on "high" but then there's the 3.1 GB RAM limit to take into consideration.... My 16 GB RAM cries at that.

Shadows are bugged with ultra.

Bugged how?

Hmm, maybe I shouldn't just trust Geforce Experience to handle everything, lol

They are bugged because some smart person thought that increasing view distance on shadows would best done by streching them instead of making them visible at longer distance (like every other sane dev).

So I could without much loss just drop the quality to say medium and gain a possible 10+ FPS boost?

Maybe but high is the best quality and I believe the difference between high and medium is smaller performace wise.

Ok, thanks.

Is there a way to completely remove shadows?

If I have them on medium or higher my characters body has the missing texture thing but on low my character is not effected. I don't like having it on low because it leaves weird lines everywhere.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2228119

I've noticed... I'm not one to complain about graphics, but I've been wondering why my shadows get all jittery when the sun moves instead of changing smoothly. They also get jittery from a distance[very noticeable when dragon riding.] This is because of Ultra-high?