Good Morning,

I was wondering if anyone is aware of an INI line which would disable "dynamic" shadows like the light from a fire or the shadows constantly updating to reflect tree sway. I would prefer the shadow map to be rendered only once every few seconds at most.

Underlying issue here is I play with a large shadow map resolution which makes for much improved shadows, but it becomes a little laggy when there is a lot of shadow movement going on such as in a thick forest or in some indoor areas with a dynamic light casting a lot of shadow.

Thanks!

Wondering the same since it looks terrible when the shadow starts moving every 10 sec, but i have a hard time figuring out a fix for it since its either making the shadow movement update constantly at a great fps loss or make them static causing the enviroment going out of sync with the lightsource position.

If shadows are rendered on the CPU no way it will happen in the near future and i dont think they are remaking the engine to make shadows run on the GPU.


Maybe you could make the days longer so there is fewer shadow movements, but it might mess up with the AI.

If the shadow map was not being generated every frame, every object that moved between the renders would have seriously glitched shadows (unless they're generating a separate map for statics).

You could try reducing the shadow distance to get more shadow detail per screen pixel. Might even speed the game up since there should be fewer objects in the shadow area then.

I did reduce the distance to improve the quality, which was great but performance is about the same. The shadow map resolution size is what is demanding for the GPU, whatever it blankets it over doesn't matter so much.

I did find this, which will remove all light flickering from fireplaces and such, by placing under [General] in Skyrim.ini:

fFlickeringLightDistance=0.0000

Unfortunately it does not boost quality and I can only assume that in the presence of the light the shadow map is being rendered just as frequently just with no effect. I've seen this sort of "background" work dragging Skyrim down before. For example you can drop the shadow distance to 0 but if you keep the shadow map resolution high it will still take a performance hit.

You probably use the 4GB launcher to start Skyrim but try starting the game via steam. Then go to options, advanced, and push the 'shadows' down from ultra to high. Make a backup of the .ini's first though as this may overwrite a few settings. Then you can adjust them back one by one (in the .ini) to see which one is the performance killer.

Yes, I don't use Steam, I can adjust shadow settings straight in the INI, I'm familiar with what the different settings mean. Although I could drop the shadow quality to improve performance, the part I'm struggling with is that I can enjoy the 4096 shadow map resolution in 95% of the game no problem. It is only in places where the shadow map is being regenerated constantly in large amounts, like under lots of swaying tree branches or certain indoor areas with fireplaces or other dynamic light sources and lots of cast shadows that I take the performance hit. A building or rock shadow dosn't change except when the sun update occurs, which is very infrequent compared to the near constant sway of trees or the like. I've tried cutting the tree sway, reducing flickering lights as above and what not... but so far nothing.

A lot of the flickering is caused by the sun updating. Try playing with these values you can put in Skyrim.ini:

fSunShadowUpdateTime=1.0000fSunUpdateThreshold=0.5000

I think the default for both of these is "0.0000".

No, those are the default values you gave. 0.0 is not recommended and will actually make it look crazy, like constant sun update. I play with fSunShadowUpdateTime=4.0000 because it increases the time between updates. This shadow change on sun update is not my issue though, it is infrequent and doesn't impact performance very much. I'm talking about the shadows which are constantly changing as in a new rendered shadow map for every single frame.

Saddly, that is every singel shadow-map in the game... (Which renders every frame.)

The best you can hope for, is to kill the tree-motion by setting the tree sway values to 0.0001 distance. However that will do nothing for the sun reflections on the moving people, or due to the tween-animations of the sun. (You can reduce the tweens, but you can not remove them, as they are hard-coded into the program. You can only control the tween-tweens, lol, with the INI settings.)

The problem is... unless you, and the world, stands still... you are constantly calculating the shadow-map, as it moves with you... If the shadow-maps didn't recalculate, you would have still shadows under moving people and trees and animals.

You want them off... turn them down to 64 size and have all them fade at 0.0001. (Poof, no more buggy frame-killing shadows... You won't notice they are gone after a while. You still have ambient and self-shadowing which works fine inside and out. But some places may feel less ambient.

Which values control these?