Having a very strange issue which seems to only affect the Ultra shadows. The problem is, they don't show up. At all. I've tried clearing cloud saves and deleting all skyrim files and re-installing the game, starting a new game, downloading an fresh ini; nothing works.

I'm not really sure what to do about it - high shadows show up fine - it's only the Ultra ones.

I'm on an AMD 7950.

I've tried to google this extensively and can't seem to find anyone else with this issue.

Anyone that can shed some light on this?

Shadows are CPU based, not GPU. If you want shadows to look good, you need to do some INI tweaks, and even then, your performance/aestheic tradeoff curve is very steep (again, being CPU rendered in this game)

It has nothing to do with them looking good, they don't show up at all - only when they are set to Ultra. If I set the shadows to High, they show up.

Also, I'm on an i5 @ 3.8ghz - I'm fairly sure that's enough for the shadows. If I could see them. I'm really at a loss as to why they aren't visible.

Even if the Ultra Shadows show up, they are not going to look good. The performance drop is huge, and the shadows still do not look good. As I said, if you want the shadows to look better than high, you need to tweak the INI to get that.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1171258/skyrim-ini-tweak-for-amazing-looking-shadows

If your goal is to just run Ultra shadows to see if you can, well, run them on high because they look the same as Ultra in the stock game. Even if they showed up, you would turn them off after a while. In other words, your not missing anything by not having Ultra Shadows set.