This time I have a technical question.

I've read a lot about the Shadow Distance option being somewhat ridiculous, as that it jumps from 6000 to 20000 from medium to high setting and noticed a remarkable performance increase when I dropped down to medium.

My question is: What does that actually mean? 6000 what? Polygons?

How does that distance setting work exactly, and what are its' effects on how the game world is rendered?

And sorry if I posted this in the wrong forum, apparently there is no Tech-subforum and it isn't really a hard-/software issue, is it?

I am not sure but I think it is the distance at which objects will cast shadows, although what units it uses I do not know.

So if you have shadow distance of 6000, and you are standing 5990 from a building that building will cast a shadow. If you then move to 6010 away from that building it would stop casting a shadow.

Ye, I know it's some sort of unit for distance, but which one?

Shadows are done on the cpu only, changing its setting 2.000 world units, 3.000 world units, 14,000 world units the higher you go the more performance is going to be affected. But the big draw back is this, it is only using 1-2 cores or even a small percentage of our cpus, as it is right now no one on the planet can run it at Ultra in Fallout 4 and keep a nice steady 60 FPS all though the game due to the fact that it is not taking advantage of our processors as it should. Get the mod shadow boost it will let it dynamically change based on FPS performance. Mine Ranges from 2000 to 7000 to keep a nice 57-60 smooth FPS in game, hope that helps.

One wonders why, in this age where literally every PC capable of running Fallout 4 (and other modern games) has multiple CPU cores and multithreading, the game makers don't take full advantage of it to improve their games performance and speed on them? Been wondering this for years now.

And what about consoles? They're already at their limits, and I don't know if switching the processor that calculates shadows is an easy thing to do. Besides, maybe they just didn't do it when they ported the game to PC.

Anyway, anyone any (wow...) idea what exactly 1 "world unit" is? That kind of was the original question

If a game developer shall take full advantage of the hardware we have in PC and even consoles we have today, they better create a new game engine or at least do some updates. After I begin to use EnB, mine games (not only Bethesda) runs more smoother, mine PC fans do not go crazy, steady fps at 30. I don't have any super machine, just a decent one - I cannot set everything at ultra, but I'm pleased anyway. New machine later.

Cheers,

-Klevs

If the unit of measurement is the same as it was in Skyrim (probably a safe bet it's been the same since Morrowind), then the character model is about 128 Units tall. http://www.creationkit.com/Unit.