Requesting a mod that will make the shadows render from our GPU, rather than the CPU.

Currently shadows are rendered from the CPU, which is why we get heavy framerate drops when increasing our shadow quality and especially in cities. I'm assuming Bethesda made shadows render from the CPU because the xbox 360 and ps3 rendered shadows better this way.
They must have forgotten to change this for the PC port.

That would probably require changes to the engine itself, which we don't really have access to I think.

This. Though honestly I wouldn't be suprised if BGS makes that change themselves, seeing as how everyone on this board thinks less of them for it. It's a needed change for console to PC porting, and I think they may see that.

Really? Wow, that's... an incredible oversight.

Betcha someone's kicking themselves over forgetting that one.

Yeah, forgetting to allow our GPUs to render the shadows in the game is a pretty careless thing to do. Hopefully they'll patch this in, if they care about the PC port.

Wow, that's . . . odd. Hopefully Bethesda will fix this.

Assuming this is what's actually happening I'd imagine they had a good reason for leaving it that way, I just hope it was an issue of time rather than impossibility, low FPS in cities makes Jack a dull boy, patch please Bethesda.

The 'good reason' is because xbox 360 and ps3 render shadows better using their cpu rather than their oldschool gpu. They likely forgot to change the how shadows are rendered for the PC port. An oversight.

This has already been tested, by the way. Shadows are, in fact, being rendered from the CPU.

From what I've been reading with my bethesda updates I get though email.
That they noticed this, and change is coming in a patch.
when that patch is coming who knows.

Uh, what? Tested by who?

I'm looking at it right now, and the shadow map buffer is drawn by the GPU. They then draw all the objects in the scene again, writing to a screen-sized buffer containing shadow-only information, again by the GPU. This buffer is then sampled when drawing the final scene, again by the GPU. No weird CPU shadow drawing is occurring.

How do you know this is true? Skyrim uses 100% of my GPU core, the only game to ever do so(I don't play everything though). I can't see what is rendering what but i know this, the shadow system in Skyrim should never have been released. It's abysmal and that is coming from a huge Bethesda fan boy. It's an even worse implemented feature than OB's LOD and that is saying a lot. The only up side here is that the shadows can be turned off and everything that is left is just gorgeous accept for a few things that bug me like, the stuttering when moving the camera diagonally(that might be related to the shadows though, haven't bothered to turn them off yet).

I'd be mad if they hadn't nailed my biggest gripe with OB which was the LOD. Distant land in Skyrim looks phenomenal and I couldn't be happier with it. Shadows are now my biggest gripe with the latest generation of Bethesda open world games. Hopefully when we breach the next gen they don't try too go to far with the graphics. I'd be happy with a game that looked about the same as Skyrim but was highly polished. Just like all Beth games though I'm sure it will be a diamond in the ruff.

I love you Beth, your the one that I adore, and you'll always be my...door(to another world). All in all you did a good job and I'll take the good with the bad. (margaritas make me long winded and sappy, so sorry. meant every word though.)

What if your cpu is great but your graphics card is crap?

gt 220 (crap)

athlon 2 x4 2.6 (decent)

I really think this is just rumormongering, I have shadows that look fine and no slowdown.
I have yet to see convincing "tests" proving this.

I hope so. My poor CPU is doing all the work. There also seems to be a bug that causes horrendous shadow flicker on lower shadow qualities, and switching the load to the gpu would allow me to maintain performance while running decent shadows again.

My shadows look like crap. Straight up 8-bit looking blocky things. The rest of the world looks beautiful, just not shadows. Had to turn them off. Can't comment on the CPU/GPU thing really, as I haven't tested it or seen actual tests (nor do I know how to test for it). But I think it's safe to say there's nothing a mod will be able to change to fix them. Maybe a third-party app, but nothing that can be accessed through the CK.

We can call it forgetting

The game is just CPU intensive. I mean it runs better than STALKER, Crysis and GTA4 which are the closest examples to Skyrim's full dynamic lighting. Using the CPU to draw shadows is awfully slow, we would all be getting 5 to 10 FPS if that was true.

DX11 mode should provide some performance improvements as it eliminates most of the CPU overhead for GPU operations such as drawing shadows.

Skyrim does NOT have full dynamic lighting
It has local lighting. Shadows are not global illumination. It's outdated and inefficient. But GPU-based.
If Skyrim had the lighting engine those other games have, it would look and run 10 times better