» Thu May 17, 2012 5:03 pm I never had any crashing or lag problems. The game has always run smoothly for me, but like many of you I was offended by the ugly, blocky shadows, narrow field of vision, and the "shimmering/strobing" shadow effect that occurred every few seconds.
1) In the process of trying various tweaks that were proposed, I somehow created for myself a weird problem where the loading screen images all turned pink. I solved that by deleting both .ini files from the My Documents/My Games/Skyrim folder. Next time I ran the game, it was all back to normal.
2) I have a wide-screen monitor, so I changed the default FOV from 75 to 90 by adding fdefaultfov=90 Under [General] in skyrim.ini. I tried 95 but it was a bit "fish-eye".
3) I wanted prettier shadows, and I finally found this solution, which works beautifully... In the game launcher I chose "ultra" and left all else at default. I exited, and edited the skyrimprefs.ini thus: I changed fShadowDistance from 8000 to 2500, and saved the change. Now I have really pretty shadows near wherever my character is.
4) Last, to minimize the obvious and annoying shadow shimmer, I opened the console in my save game, and entered the command "set timescale to 10". The shadows still get rewritten, but much less often, which greatly minimizes the annoyance. Of course, this means that all time in the game passes more slowly than it would at the default 30, but I don't really care about that.
The result is a really pretty improvement and my game-play is as smooth as ever.
