Hi everybody, I want to use 1.5 and new kill cameras but performance loss it's just to big ,after playing smooth with 1.4 patch + skyboost at 50Hz and 50fps now with 1.5 my game drops fps every few seconds and game stutters a lot. Is there any way "real way" to disable those unnecessary grass shadows or this is something else causes perfomance loss in 1.5?

in skyrim ini.

under the [display] heading, put the following entry

bShadowsOnGrass=0

should add tthis will only help with grassy areas, trees and such will still hurt the fps

this line does nothing. Go to Alchemist's Shack , wait for rain (when raining you can see shadows very clear) ,near house there are trees everywhere ,and you will see the shadows still there on the grass near trees. I've tried this method few days ago . Everybody recommends it without knowing that this line does nothing .

I think I got rid of the shadows by doing this in Skyrimprefs under Display:

iShadowFilter=0

Can't remember exactly if that's the right one or not.

nope

make sure your .ini is set to read only after you make changes seems after 1.5 the game likes to ignore custom changes....
might help might not worth a few seconds to try

LOL

bShadowsOnGrass=0,1 - Its this line exactly that will toggle shadows on grass, if you don't see the difference then you are doing something wrong. At first I too did notice a decrease in performance once I had updated to the 1.5 patch. However I found that deleting Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini and letting Skyrim generate new .ini files fixed the problem and went back to being as smooth as before as with the 1.4 update. Skyrim is VERY temperamental, meaning that when you have made any custom changes to either SkyrimPrefs.ini or Skyrim.ini, and then make a change in the graphics settings through the official game launcher, it will reset the ini files and apply the changes from the launcher. I have even noticed the game will reset the ini files even without touching any settings from the launcher from time to time. But in a nutshell its the shadows in the game which are the biggest performance hitter, let me know if you need to tweak the shadows to get better performance.

Very true I tend to do a TOTAL reinstall(everything) after each patch.

I'm so glad I found this. After updating to 1.5.24, my game was practically rendered unplayable. This helped me a lot! Thanks.

Every update will reset certain ini values the first time the game is run after updating, or more precisely, the first time the game is run via the launcher. If you make your ini files read only or only ever launch Skyrim via the skse_loader, this typically won't happen. The reason for this is for stability. By resetting certain values (fShadowDistance is an example of an often reset value), BGS can set a baseline on a particular system that is closer to what was tested. I don't know all the variables that get reset, but I assume they are (or at some time were) the most problematic ones.

Personally, I always keep backups of my INI files and normally keep them read-only, but even some of the beta builds will overwrite this read-only setting. This should not be occurring with any of the release builds.

It was not my impression that shadows on grass can be disabled. This feature is also only available on the PC.

it removes/alters some effect that they've put on the grass. i notice that there are still some shadows that you see on the grass, so it's not universal. i still gain as much as10fps by disabling it.

It's a little funny, because it's like:

Gamer - "Me wantz bettor grafixkz 4 skyrims itz sukz mor coz of battulfeuld!!&"

Beth - "Here's shadows on grass, it's a start"

Gamer - "Hows me tern dem ophs?"

I lol'd

OK i found out that after 1.5 somehow my biggest performance hitter is anti-aliasing ,before patch 1.5 anti-aliasing almost had no impact on skyrims performance but now it is a performance eater ,turning it off my fps jumps about 15 higher ,those patches from Beth just makes the game more unplayable -performance wise .

This.

well your joke is not funny,because when somebody who has brains adds something which can effect performance they add an option to disable it ,and where that option in skyrim? I have a massive fps drops after they forced me to use their ugly shadows,and Bethesda don't care . Their programing skills on the PC below average

I've stopped playing few days ago...
So when start playing again, will be forced to upgrade, and will be rendered unplayable...
Hope these tips here..(two topics on it allready.. realy scaring... .. will help...

Who asked 4 shadows on grass anyway?

Bethesda do something !!!! remove your ugly grass shadows or add some options to disable them !!!!! I paid you so work on this .

I did... and it was delivered, so I'm very happy. For once Bethesda did something (some) people wanted and now the rest is ranting about it. Just deal with it. The effect looks great, it add so much to the overall look of the game especially in forests and such. That damn fluorescent grass before looked so distracting and wrong it was making me almost crazy.
I've never seen an option to turn grass shadows off in any game to this day. It's the kind of thing every game has and nobody asks to have it turned off because that's just nonsense. Why don't you ask gamesas to add a "turn all rocks off" button? Rocks affect performance too, there's lots of them in Skyrim...
Btw my 5 or 6 years old quad core CPU has absolutely no problems rendering those shadows with max shadows distance (14000 units), shadow resolution of 4096 and three times the grass distance. What is "unplayable" for you anyway? 40fps? If it's that bad just decrease the details somewhere else, you have like 6 sliders and heaps of other available options in the launcher.
Or just open your SkyrimPrefs.ini...

i had 60-50fps everywhere and now with those shadows in riften and solitude swamps i have fps drops to 35 . skyrim just looks bad like no other game if fps below 50 .it's designed to run on 50-60fps on the PC and this is not the same as turn off the rocks . at least if they add something make an option to disable it if the effect can effect performance . skyrim was struggling with performance even before the grass shadows so why the hell they added those shadows if they reduces fps even more . Sometimes I just don't understand what a hell Bethesda doing ..

Actually the game was designed to run 25 to 30 fps, it's a console game ported to PC. Sometimes I can't even get close to your 35 fps and I don't mind that. As long as the controls are responsive it's ok. I don't agree that Skyrim needs 60 fps to look good. Games like Crysis 2 or Battlefield 3 need that with all the motion blur and explosions going on, Skyrim doesn't have that. Btw you used to have 50 to 60 fps and you call it "struggling with performance"? Come on, you have a supercomputer in you room? How much fps would you like? 600?
Now I don't quite like the way shadows are rendered in Skyrim (by CPU) but it was a decision Beth made either because of the engine limitations or consoles design so I understand that.
Yeah and correction - Oblivion had the option to turn the grass shadows off if I remember correctly. But in Oblivion, it really killed the performance. Skyrim is ok compared to that.

take for example Witcher 2,crysis (all of them)and then skyrim,oblivion,fallout any Bethesdas game and limit to 30fps with any fps limiter ,you will see the difference how bad it looks compared to Witcher 2 or Crysis on the PC. bethesdas games on consoles and 30fps looks good but on PC definitely not . All i need is 50fps and after patch 1.4 I had it +Skyboost (even anti aliasing was on 4x ,but those shadows on the grass really made skyrim unstable and even with anti aliasing turned off

It's funny how some people try desperately to defend grass shadows not being togglable.
When a graphical option hurts performance, you're stupid if you don't make it togglable. Any person can understand that people have different computers that run differently well. I lose 5-8 FPS and before patch 1.5 my game felt smooth. Now it feels laggy and stuttery

Moreover, the grass shadows are buggy. They are ridiculously dark during dark lighting, for instance in foggy and rainy weather. The darkness in other words stacks. This looks really bad. That's another reason to have grass shadows togglable.

Finally, Oblivion even had grass shadows togglable, but that .ini setting is now broken in Skyrim.

Grass shadows themselves are nothing wrong. It's a good decision to add such features, because it's kind of laughable if a new game in 2011 doesn't have the same graphical feature a game in 2005 had (Oblivion). Now to add such a graphical feature that is buggy, and really hurts performance (for some people even make the game almost unplayable if they have weak computers) and can't be toggled off... it suddenly turns from a good decision to an awful, terrible decision.

Now if I were Bethesda, I would do some seriously rework on shadows. Not only fix the grass shadows bug and make it togglable, but also fix the stripy shadows so many people have, and for god's sake make shadows look decent (big, stripy, flickery blocks of shaded black does NOT look good). Oh, and either remove shadows on characters or make them look sharper, because now they're just big flickery blocks which are very visible when talking to the NPCs and looks terrible.
Shadows since 11/11/11 has been a mess in Skyrim and are a proof of Bethesda's unprofessionalism when it comes to technology. Patch 1.5 did not make it better, but even worse. I've seen any game from 2006 and after do a much better job than Bethesda when it comes to shadows.

/End of rant.

and by the way they sold 10millions why they can't spare two guys to make it even more optimized ,why all hard work must be done by the community like Alexander Blade who is doing that for free . Any way all I want is just have that option to turn those shadows on the grass OFF after next patch .