ive never had any crashes, any issues, and im so, so happy about my new hd tex pack, i just gotta drop this one on you, shadows svck. indoor, outdoor, upsidedown, nothing draws me out of an immersive experience more than amature shadows. still cant belive my eyes. my rig is built for this game, whos gonna fix shadows first, bethesda or our kickass modders? and there should be money involved.

"shadows svck"

So does amateur grammar, I believe.

Skyrim's shadows do need some work, but they haven't spoiled my mood in-game yet.

If you're coming down on this person because you believe there should be an apostrophe in "shadows" I will ridicule you.

yep the worst shadows in any game ive ever played

its quite pathetic really

Xbox shadows.

Although I'm sure it was meant in jest, this probably provides more of an explanation than anyone really wants to admit. Were this a strictly PC title, the quality of the shadows would not have been deemed acceptable by Bethesda.

There are a ton of suggestions for tweaking shadow quality, so I don't claim to have solved the problem. I have mitigated it to an extent where I don't notice it anymore with the following changes to SkyrimPrefs.ini:

It works, but it makes the game so slow, so I removed it.

If your hardware isn't up to the task (I have a i7-2600k and a GTX 580), the shadow resolution may be too high. The other settings might still help improve things. The only important ones are the iBlurDeferedShadowMask=5 and fShadowDistance=4000. Those shouldn't have any effect on performance.

Thanks for the tip bro.

Problem is, you have too short shadow distance so you get many shadow pop-ups/streams, and the distant forests look much worse without the tree shadows in the distant.
I hate that you have to sacrifice distance vs. blocky shadows...

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=5fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000fShadowDistance=4000.0000

These 3 shouldnt really affect performance, they might actually improve it somewhat. But these...

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=2048iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096

Can drop your FPS like a rock . The last one is the biggest frames killer, but can also have the biggest effect on shadows.

For me I cant use iBlur because it makes any object up against shadows basically glow , I think its an ATI issue.

Edit: Dropping shadow distance isnt all that bad really, most of the time youre wandering through a forest and cant see passed the tree in front of you. But youll notice it in towns.

very true words. on my rig shadows affect performance just as much, if not more, than AA