So yeah, running everything on ULTRA except shadows on medium / high / ultra (tried em all, and they seem to be the most demanding visual option, so i keep testing medium/high)

Anyway is this game having abnormally horrible shadows indoors? They're like a [censored] jaggy mess i've barely seen before in any other game :

[img]http://i.imgur.com/Kd9ge.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/FZ43k.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/4cwN8.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/XYxMD.jpg[/img]

what is your video card?

GTX 580, that's not the point. Check the pictures, i've asked some friends and they see the same crap on their screens.

I run everything on complete max and yeah, shadows are bad. The game overall looks really good for a TES game..but there are some crappy things. Shadows are blocky as you said...many textures are poor too.

isn't there going to be a patch on 11/11/11? that might fix some of these things

http://i.imgur.com/FZ43k.jpg

Sems like the game forgot to load the sword textures

Hehe, I'm picky about color/contrast but in those screens, the shadows look ok to me. Not saying they're super-clarity in terms of lines or whatever, but they don't look "super jagged". I never pay much attention to shadows tho. Maybe it looks worse in-game/motion.

@vandridine - I think the 1.1 patch is supposed to get installed when the game unlocks/just before you can play (for Steam copies anyway)....at least, that's what I read/am assuming.

The shadows are just rendered in low resolution, that's something that should be easily fixable with an .ini tweak.

Then it's normal. PC has just been ripped off by Bethesda... Again.

Shadow Quality seems to be tied primarily to the draw distance given to shadows. You can dramatically increase the quality of shadows by limiting how far out they are rendered via a few simple .ini files tweaks which I'll run you through.

Browse to C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\ and open up Skyrimperfs.ini with notepad or your text editor of choice, it would also be a good idea to make a backup of the file just in case.

Now a quick rundown of the options you're looking for and what they do.

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=: This controls the amount of edge blurring applied to dynamic shadows throughout the game, 3 is the default amount and 0 is disabled. You can lower this value to 1 or 2 get shadows with much sharper edges.

fInteriorShadowDistance=
fShadowDistance=: These control the draw distance on shadows in indoor and outdoor areas and have a significant impact on shadow quality as well (lower draw distance = higher quality), the default values for this vary depending on what shadow quality you selected, I find that 2000 for both provides the best balance between quality and draw distance.

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=
iShadowMapResolution=: These supposedly all influence shadow quality as well, though I haven't done a lot of mucking around with them to test. I set all to 4096 for best results anyway.

Now for my settings.

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=1

fInteriorShadowDistance=2000.0000
fShadowDistance=2000.0000

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=4096
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096

iShadowMapResolution=4096

Make changes as you see fit or experiment a little and save the file, now start up skyrim, your shadows should be much prettier.

I hope this was helpful.

Yeah, Crysis shadows look better at 1024 than Skyrim's 4096 and Crysis was a 2007 game.

Bethesda isn't that great at technology... I don't think that's a big secret , and their games are so different and has so much more content than most other games we see today so they have different priorities.

Crytek spends most of their time doing technology. They advertise it. They sell it. They need to be much better at it, and they are tons better at it.

If we could merge Crytek and Bethesda together, we'd be having a pretty awesome looking performance running game
It would mean awesome shadows, photorealistic lighting, much bigger draw distance, subtle LOD streaming instead of massive pop-up chunks, awesome tessellation and parallax occlusion for bumpiness, true volumetric clouds, dynamic skybox, much better physics, etc etc etc. Drooling at the thought of it

OT: I think your shadows look OK. Mine look much more jagged, and I have Ultra shadows, but that's because I have 8000 shadow distance. How your shadows look like pretty much comes down two 4 factors which you must weight which you prefer the most: render distance, detail, sharpness, bluriness. I value render distance, detail and sharpness highest, and thus I have to suffer from pixelated shadows at high performance cost at the same time, but in turn I have shadows as far as my view distance goes and the distant views look very pretty.

Well, there is nothing stopping them from using the Cryengine or Unreal Engine but because Bethesda decided to cut corners and skimp on tech then that's what you get. In the end the game was made for consoles and you get poor quality because of it as show throughout the game, not just the shadows.

If they unlock the shadow distance then we might get somewhere but I think the performance will make it unplayable because like the engine it's just not optimised very well.

Um there is something.The game is already running like crap and not everyone has a GTX 580/Radeon HD 6950 you know.

Well, Crysis runs better on highest settings than Skyrim for me so meh. Skyrim's ultra shadows use 4096 but don't reflect the true quality because if the distance capping so you get a massive performance hit for hardly any quality difference. Crysis has a a large quality difference between 1024 and 4096 with the proper performance hit given.

You are all aware that this thread was from november, right after release?
While the issue surely still exists, I'm not so sure if OP still cares much.

Necromancers...