Help with Skyrim's shadows!

bruniss

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Feb 28, 2013
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Hi ppl!

Okay, first of all, I've tried almost every fix I could find on the internet before posting this. I've also tried Nexus without any results. here it goes:

With everything set to Ultra, the game's shadows look awful. The are extremely pixelated/jagged/flickering/struttering/whatever you wanna call it, and I can't do anything about it. I messed with the Skyrimprefs.ini file a lot, made sure it wasn't set to read-only (also setting it to read-only just in case), I downloaded other people's .ini files, I changed the shadow resolution, I changed shadow detail to medium and then applied all the changes again, I updated my drivers, I uninstalled Skyrim, I deleted the ini file so Steam would create a new one.

I am CLUELESS. The game is almost unbearable. The shadows mess up the whole game. It's weird because shadows NEVER change. With low or ultra settings, they stay the same. Especially the shadows that are generated by trees and plants, these are the worse.
The game always runs smoothly, probably 90-100 fps easy. On my first play-through I encountered no issues, everything look nice. A few months later I decided to give it another shot so I re-downloaded it and found this.

Please, can anyone help me??
 

bruniss

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Feb 28, 2013
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Thank you, I'll try this tool and see how it goes. Btw, I'm playing with shadow res on 16k and shadow distance on 2500. When the shadows are under me the look fine, but shadows that are 20 feet away from me dont. At least it's something.
 

bruniss

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Feb 28, 2013
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I don't think the shadow distance is high since ultra is 8000. Most guides recommend to lower it to 3000 or 2800.
 

bruniss

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Feb 28, 2013
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Thank you, but as I stated on my first post, all those fix I've tried already. The only thing that "works" is by keeping shadow distance to 2000-2500 and shadow map res at 4k (I was trying 16k looking for any difference but no...- haha). I changed my .ini files a lot with those tweaks, to very little improvement.
If people haven't found a solution I guess it's impossible to fix at all. It's a shame. It used to look great and now it's oh so messed up. Those damn patches... I wonder if there is a way to "tell" skyrim not to care about performance and render all shadows at %100 regardless of the shadow distance.
 

bruniss

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Feb 28, 2013
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I have a new issue, but I'm pretty sure it's something I tweaked wrong. Everytime I go inside a house (but not a cave), I get a huge fps drop. After a few seconds it goes away but it comes back a few seconds later. Does any of you know what I tweaked wrong?
 
What I would suggest you do is play around with the setting through skyrim configurator. There are MANY tweaks and each PC seems to take them differently. I think I spent over 100 hours tweaking skyrim to the perfect settings, although I'm a perfectionist.

One setting that is critical is shadow bias scale(max val of 1.0). This setting adjusts what surface can be hit by a shadow. Higher values will make shadows look more clean by removing the metric ton of little shadows that skyrim's engines casts. Overall I find this setting at 0.9 along with ENB + SSAO make the game much more realistic. Let's enb handle the detailed shadows.