yep we already tried it. its down to we have to wait for the next patch. Bethesda knows its the shaders. they found the reason already. its called the grass shader effect. not to be mistaken for grass shadows thats diffrent. its the effect that binds the shadows to the ground. the problem is in some hardware setups the game unbinds the shadows from the ground. casts a shadow over the hole game and also casts the shadows that are cast from objects through your view. and I really like the default FOV comment Luckely I like first person view. or I would have had a barf bucket by me a long time ago.

Ya should have mentioned I have noticed no shadows on grass(not that I want it) at all since the update so maybe that is helping with performance.....yep the FOV tweak allows me to keep the game in First Person which I prefer to do all the time.

PS I frequent these boards multiple times of day as my job is pretty boring so anyone feel free to friend me and if you have a more pointed question send me a PM so we don't eat up post limits on threads

community requests. kill cam toggle fix for those who do not like the kill cams

response ( update 1.5 ) we have added more kill cams to the game and we also intrigrated a new feature called toggle compatability. sadly the toggle for compatability is intrigrated with the kill cam toggle wich we have yet to fix. we will look twards doing that in future updates.

I love kill cams but they heat my card up more than anything else and thus the option to disable should be there....along with tons of other graphics settings...FOV and DOF ranges maybe even ugrids we aren't all running 32 bit OS on 4 GB of ram anymore.

ugrids are able to be changed. the problem with doing that is crashing after long periods of play (over an hour) and crashing with large save files. plus even if you turn it back to default the saved games you saved with higher settings will not reflect lowering ugrid settings. you have to run a script to fix the issue then do a save.

Edit : I think the issue with larger Ugrid is when a grid is loaded so are all the scripts that are in those grids. causing scripts that shouldn't be running to crash because you are not there to interact with it.

ya I messed with 7 but it was lackluster waiting on a solid 9 that takes advantage of my system RAM....no crashing but it just wasn't worth it.

No sign of this being fixed?

I wish I'd just gone and killed Alduin if the game was going to be destroyed by a patch like this.

I guess that you and the rest of us will have to wait for Bethesda to fix the problem in the next patch.

You guys setting your .ini files to read only after making changes?

Hope this fix this soon, cause the game is very hard to play with these shadow issues.

Exactly the same problem here, on Radeon HD2600. I've just noticed the thread so I thought I'd chip in (with no solution unfortunately).

I found a temporary fix to this issue. It's a mod that tricks Skyrim into thinking you're running NVIDIA. I guess NVIDIA doesn't suffer from this problem at all.

It's the "Framerate Fix for ATI cards" mod on Skyrim Nexus, just do a search as I can't post links here.
I was also having an issue with transparent water, this mod fixed that as well. I have a problem with not being able to see underwater now though.

That's not true, in this same thread, some nVidia users commented on having the same issue.

Those of you that have nVidia cards, did you see any improvements when using the latest drivers (beta it appears)?

I can confirm that if the graphics adapter (on the initial options menu) is shown as an NVIDIA card, the problem goes away. I didnt have this problem until I somehow changed the graphics adapter to the correct ATI Radeon mobility HD 3670. I did get a HUGE performance boost when the graphics adapter was set to the correct (ATI) option even though I still have the missing shadows problem, so I would recommend against messing with that.

@thorhammer91: Some nVidia users complained having this issue too, so it's not AMD/ATI related only.

Updated my AMD/ATI drivers to v12.04 but it didn't solve the isse, the problem with shadows persisted.
The drivers even worsened my game experience, every kind of textures are completely broken, misplaced and stretched...

As the time passes, I'm regretting more and more to have a AMD/ATI GPU... Their working policy on drivers seems to be "hit or miss", they release them every month, don't care if the drivers are stable or not...

Once I have the chance, I'm dumping AMD/ATI for good and return to nVidia like in the ol'days, which never let me down, they at least are more responsible when it comes to drivers - used Riva TNT, Riva TNT2 64MB, Gf2 MX400, Gf4 MX440, Gf6600 and Gf7600.

Going back to AMD/ATI v12.03 drivers, dumping Skyrim v1.5 patch and replacing it with the good v1.4.27 (the last stable for me).

I'm tired of waiting for a stable patch "promised" by Beth that fixes the havoc made by v1.5 (it's been over a month without even launching Skyrim due to the game-breaking graphical glitches made by v1.5), and of AMD/ATI driver's developing team incompetence with testing and bug fixing.

I've had the exact same problem with shadows that many others have had here (someone posted this video, which describes it well at youtube at /watch?v=AlSNe_evsok&list=FL279J0mvbAow64h1_3ealVw&index=41&feature=plpp_video )

I'm using Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT at the latest drivers available for my computer. Nothing has worked. I wish I could go back to 1.427 (my backups have had issues). I don't care that my computer won't give me the best graphics, but I'd like to not have this massive glitch (I'm comfortable with morrowind level graphics).

When DLC comes out I don't think I will get it if this glitch is still around for me. I might as well wait/try to find a solution first for the parts of the game I do have.

That's not the glitch we're discussing here. What we're discussing is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puZftjv7Dds

Your problem was discussed in others threads/topics and apparently has a solution, you just have to search for them.

The problem to this thread is related doesn't have a solution until Beth fixes it in the next patch as they told.

Thanks Raen, I think I misunderstood some of the first post in that case (like the "invisible" and "stretching", which does seem to happen for me, but not like the video you described). I'm sorry if the post wasn't meant for this thread's topic.

If you could message me any links/threads I would be grateful (so as to not derail this thread). I have already searched however and no solutions have seemed to work for me (all threads on driver upgrades have been dead ends for me. disabling shadows hasn't been much of a fix. The only thing I'm aware of that I haven't tried yet is the realistic lights mod, which might/might not work for fixing it.)

Edit: Thanks again.

I'm sorry but I don't know the links to any specific thread related to your problem, I only remember seeing some while navigating the forum while searching for a fix for mine. But if I'm not wrong, some were able to fix that "bouncing shadows" glitch by tweaking the .ini's and changing the shadow bias scale or something like that.

Try to search for "shadow" and read the threads that appear and see if they are related to your problem, or just CTRL+F for "shadow" in your browser while navigating the forum pages.

Realistic Lighting and ENB mods apparently don't solve the various shadow glitches introduced by v1.5 patch - they didn't solve mine.

Sorry for the double post, but finally I was able to fix this issue. Although it is related to Skyrim v1.5 patch, it is also related to GPU drivers.

Dumping AMD/ATI drivers for the Win7 default ones did the trick for me. Funny, eh? Maybe not.

Read this post for more info: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1368865-amd-driver-catalyst-discussion-merged-similar-topics/page__view__findpost__p__20690947

EDIT: When I mean "Win7 default drivers" I'm not talking about the ones available through Windows update, I'm referring to the ones that are installed by Win7 after you uninstall your previous ones, reboot and skip the download/install from Windows Update (you can also disconnect your internet connection) so Win7 installs the most basic/default drivers.

The drivers available at Windows Update still have this shadows glitch but not as severe when playing with AMD/ATI's own drivers. Oh, the incompetence...