OK here's the outside, forest landscape comparision, here GPU also becomes the bottleneck.

Settings: Ultra quality profile, 1680x1050, AF16x/AA4x, vsync off

Shadow quality: Ultra

[img]http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/8647/tesvultraqualityshadowu.jpg[/img]
FPS: 53

Shadow quality: High

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5024/tesvultraqualityshadowh.jpg
FPS: 73 (+38%)

Shadow quality: Medium

http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/872/tesvultraqualityshadowm.jpg
FPS: 83 (+57%)

Shadow quality: Low

http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/954/tesvultraqualityshadowl.jpg
FPS: 88 (+66%)


Settings: Low quality profile, 1680x1050, no AF/AA, vsync off

Shadow quality: Ultra

http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/3184/tesvlowqualityshadowult.jpg
FPS: 76

Shadow quality: Low

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/2724/tesvlowqualityshadowlow.jpg
FPS: 151 (+99%)

So this test here tells us that here I also become GPU limited why the low quality profile with low shadow quality settings go as high as 151 vs 88 FPS if using Ultra quality. You can still tell that even here the CPU performance matters a lot but GPU becomes the bottleneck here with Ultra quality settings too. I'd recommend sticking to perhaps "high" on Shadow quality, some users with slower CPUs might even wanna concider medium. Using Ultra quality shadows will result in FPS drops here and there even on the most powerful overclocked CPUs out there in some places. If you're getting a severe FPS drop in this game it's most likely the case that your CPU is bottlenecking while you're using Shadow quality setting that is higher than what your CPU can cope with.

Thanks for the tests!
I also noticed that. I started to play with everything on ultra, but it ran not very smooth. I only changed shadows from ultra to high and now it runs really smooth.

I'm actually a bit sad about the shadow quality now though. Usually it's possible to have smooth shadows, which don't require very much CPU/GPU-power on PC.
To be honest I had never seen such mega-edgy shadows on PC before ... only on consoles (GT5 on PS3 comes to my mind). I feel that the shadows could look much better and require much less CPU/GPU power, if they would have been implemented properly.
I don't want to whine about the performance now, because overall it's rather good for the graphics we get, but the shadows are really a thing, which could/should be improved.

Not only the shadow performance should be improved, but also those horrible lines they cast on many surfaces. Ugly! Never seen anything like that in other games with shadows.

Yes, the problem is that shadows are not hardware rendered but software rendered by the CPU! Shadows belong to the graphics card and the FPS drop would be a lot smaller if it was done by the GPU and would probably look a whole lot better too. This is just one of those things that shows it's a console port unfortunately.

bumping this thread, would gladly see some comparisions by other people that's more far into the game too.

Compelling tests, well done. I'd reduce my shadow quality from Ultra, but I don't know if I can go without tree-cast shadows outdoors.