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[MickeyKnox]

What's your HW setup? Gotta have these details to compare.

3.0 C2Q
8gigs
6970


Also what people are saying about distance affecting the shadow resolution is true, but for me, with the res set at 8192 and the distance at 8000 it's the best trade off of quality and distance, there's still some pixelation but it's significantly better than the default Ultra plus shadows don't magically phase in to existence a few feet from you.

 

[Corky]

Just change those Corky:

iShadowMapResolution=4096
fShadowDistance=2500.0000
iShadowFilter=3
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3
fShadowBiasScale=0.1500


Ps. Guys i dont know how You guys can set 8192 shadows, it so kills my performance indoors. Anyone uses OGSSAA and tried settings 8192 shadows? Whats You framerate in interiors?

thanks mate, tried those settings, and even 8192 but this is as good as they get it seems :

I'm not getting those crisp shadows ya'll are getting at distances of even 4000

 

[LiquidMetal14]

3.0 C2Q
8gigs
6970


Also what people are saying about distance affecting the shadow resolution is true, but for me, with the res set at 8192 and the distance at 8000 it's the best trade off of quality and distance, there's still some pixelation but it's significantly better than the default Ultra plus shadows don't magically phase in to existence a few feet from you.

Thanks, gonna have at it again as this is really bothering me

 

[Rekubot]

Just change those Corky:

iShadowMapResolution=4096
fShadowDistance=2500.0000
iShadowFilter=3
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3
fShadowBiasScale=0.1500


Ps. Guys i dont know how You guys can set 8192 shadows, it so kills my performance indoors. Anyone uses OGSSAA and tried settings 8192 shadows? Whats You framerate in interiors?

Same blocky shadows for me, even with shadows on ultra.

5850
i5 @ 2.7Ghz
4GB RAM

Edit: 8192 completely kills my framerate also. The blockiness of the shadows doesn't bother me as much as the way they dance every few seconds though. Has anyone managed to stop the shadows dancing?

 

[NBtoaster]

Yay the distance fix works!

Now to find the best balance...

 

[spk]

Talking about exterior shadows, I think I found a good trade-off for that as well now.

http ][/QUOTE]
Which settings gave you this? I changed mine while experimenting and forgot what I had them at previously :[ Is shadowmask=1 changing back to 3 for anyone else? It happens whenever I launch the game

 

[Shawsie64]

I didn't have a d3directx9 file in my folder anyway, put it in and I don't know if it's a placebo or not but the performance seems good.

Def not placebo for me.. Literally doubled my framerate.. I put the file in my documents/my games/skyrim folder and in my game folder

 

[MisterAnderson]

Alright I got the shadows to look better finally. Thanks for everyone's help. I'd like to try messing with ugrids now...the modifier isn't in the ini file though, so I'm not sure what it's defaulting to. What is a good starting point to modify it as?

 

[Ledsen]

What are the default settings for

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary
iShadowMapResolution


?

 

[LiquidMetal14]

What are the default settings for

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary
iShadowMapResolution


?

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=1024
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048
iShadowMapResolution=4096

You're trading off distance for res or the other way around it seems. I would not go above 4096 on the primary and secondary with a distance of only 1000. I mean, someone with CF or SLI get back to me then tell me your performance as I have a wall here that I hit. Mind you I'm gauging this based on 60fps performance. I can go higher but still am in the 30's. I would just rather have closer to 60 at all times.

 

[Durante]

So I did your paging file guide and made sure I restarted. Now this isn't a factual claim but before I changed the paging file I quickly tested the fps in Riverwood, I was getting min 40 max 56. After the paging file thing I'm getting min 45 max 60... I'm pretty sure it gave me a slight fps boost. Cheers.

Happy to help. It should also improve your day-to-day windows performance.

Will not make a difference. Disabling your page file is NOT a good idea. Set it to 768MB or so.

That's a myth. Disabling your page file makes a large difference because the windows paging algorithm sucks for large amounts of memory.

(I am well aware that there are tons of "sources" on the internet that will tell you the horrible things that happen when you disable your page file. Self-propagating myths perpetuated by pseudo-experts. I have used my 12 GB system for over a year without one, and it never crashes. The same is true for 3 other people I know. My uptime is measured in months and I use all kinds of heavy applications and games)

That does not mean the game is CPU limited. CPU limited means that the game fully utilizes your CPU and you need a faster one. What you mean to say is that it's poorly coded, and is so inefficient with the CPU that it can't fully take advantage of its power.

No. What I mean is that it's CPU limited, that is, a faster CPU would make it faster. What YOU mean is that it's insufficiently parallel. These are different things.

Which settings gave you this? I changed mine while experimenting and forgot what I had them at previously :[ Is shadowmask=1 changing back to 3 for anyone else? It happens whenever I launch the game

The final shadow settings I settled on are 4096 res, as well as:
fInteriorShadowDistance=2000.0000
fShadowDistance=5000.0000
All other settings are as default with the highest settings selected in the game config utility.

 

[Corky]

I'm still baffled about why the same (shadow)settings doesn't seem to stick to my game >_< could it be because I'm running with ugrid tweaks?

 

[LiquidMetal14]

I'm still baffled about why the same (shadow)settings doesn't seem to stick to my game >_< could it be because I'm running with ugrid tweaks?

Sounds like it but try it out. It's a slippery slope that requires some patience.

 

[MisterAnderson]

I'm not quite sure what the hell just caused this, but my Skyrim logo at the menu and numerous silver/grey things that appear in the loading screen when booting up the game is now red for me. Everything in-game seems fine, though.

The most recent thing I did was try ugrids 9, but have since then reverted it back to 5.

 

[isamu]

Any mods out yet?

 

[Phandy]

My friend just sent me this amusing little video;
Funny video, but mostly because of the funny ass bugs in the video.
"The ballad of Todd Howard"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7trmEmI5Js&feature=feedu

 

[KKRT00]

I'm still baffled about why the same (shadow)settings doesn't seem to stick to my game >_< could it be because I'm running with ugrid tweaks?

I'm using uGrid too, so thats not. I'm actually working now at checking all settings for shadows, so be a little patient

 

[MisterAnderson]

What the hell is going on here.

 

[Durante]

Any mods out yet?

There are a few fake texture mods that are simply filtered standard textures and usually worse. There are the obligatory nude mod and the obligatory chainmail bikini mod. There are some small gameplay tweaks like disabling regenerating health.

Then there's this mod which fixes female face normals. I actually use this one.

 

[Corky]

I'm using uGrid too, so thats not. I'm actually working now at checking all settings for shadows, so be a little patient

<3 gracias

 

[BigTnaples]

I'm still baffled about why the same (shadow)settings doesn't seem to stick to my game >_< could it be because I'm running with ugrid tweaks?

I am having the same issue. My shadows are no sharper no matter what tweaks I apply.

Other tweaks worked though, like the tree and world shadows ones.


I can deal with the somewhat blurry outdoor textures though. What I am not liking is some interiors seem to have very flat lighting, almost no shadows, on anything.

I really looks terrible, especially when the next room I go in has dynamic shadows casting everywhere from everything.

Is it this way for everyone? And does it have to do with interior light sources? I would LOVE a fix for it.

 

[Dennis]

FINALLY!

My shadows have been fixed to my liking.

 

[BigTnaples]

FINALLY!

My shadows have been fixed to my liking.

Drool.

Settings?

 

[BoobPhysics101]

Happy to help. It should also improve your day-to-day windows performance.

That's a myth. Disabling your page file makes a large difference because the windows paging algorithm sucks for large amounts of memory.

(I am well aware that there are tons of "sources" on the internet that will tell you the horrible things that happen when you disable your page file. Self-propagating myths perpetuated by pseudo-experts. I have used my 12 GB system for over a year without one, and it never crashes. The same is true for 3 other people I know. My uptime is measured in months and I use all kinds of heavy applications and games)


No. What I mean is that it's CPU limited, that is, a faster CPU would make it faster. What YOU mean is that it's insufficiently parallel. These are different things.

The final shadow settings I settled on are 4096 res, as well as:
fInteriorShadowDistance=2000.0000
fShadowDistance=5000.0000
All other settings are as default with the highest settings selected in the game config utility.

I didn't realize you know more about how Windows and the page file works than the 'pseudo-experts' at Microsoft and Intel... both of which recommend keeping the page file on in some way.

I think 'pseudo-experts' are the ones who propagate turning it off, using anecdotal evidence, while ignoring what the people who made the OS recommend doing. But YMMV.

And the reason a 'faster CPU would make it faster' is because it's shitty and inefficient. Today's CPU's are grossly overpowered, and for this game to gain performance by scaling them even higher is ridiculous, especially considering better looking/more intensive games are using CPU's more efficiently.

It really does reek of Morrowind and its awful optimization and engine limitations. :\

 

[NullPointer]

My shadows have been fixed to my liking.

Mine too: LOW ;P

But I'll take the 99% 55-60fps that I get from the trade-off. I'm running everything ultra, max sliders, FXAA, unmodified ini files, and AFx16, low shadows.

 

[ToastyBanana]

I really looks terrible, especially when the next room I go in has dynamic shadows casting everywhere from everything.

Is it this way for everyone? And does it have to do with interior light sources? I would LOVE a fix for it.

Yep its like that for me too. There are small cave/mine areas which don't seem to use dynamic lighting and shadows at all. Looks like the characters are floating.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

You should NEVER turn the Windows page file entirely off, no matter how much RAM you have. I thought this was common knowledge. Microsoft themselves have said as much.

 

[Durante]

This is getting tedious. I hate approaching the argument this way, but I'd like to mention that I have published papers at international conferences on the subjects of multicore scheduling and performance analysis.

The reason Microsoft recommends keeping a page file is because that will never cause crashes (just worse performance), while not doing so will. It's just that anyone with 12 GB ram that is not running software from the last millennium will not encounter these cases.

But hey, I'm not forcing you to disable your page file, I'm just trying to help people with a very large amount of main memory achieve better performance.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Man this shadow thing has consumed me today. Updating my portion of the shadow guide then I'm off, I need a break.

 

[Omikron]

This is getting tedious. I hate approaching the argument this way, but I'd like to mention that I have published papers at international conferences on the subjects of multicore scheduling and performance analysis.

The reason Microsoft recommends keeping a page file is because that will never cause crashes (just worse performance), while not doing so will. It's just that anyone with 12 GB ram that is not running software from the last millennium will not encounter these cases.

But hey, I'm not forcing you to disable your page file, I'm just trying to help people with very large amount os main memory achieve better performance.

You are giving advice that might cause people to then have systems that could crash / perform oddly. But hey, its just advice without telling people the potential ramifications I guess.

 

[Atilac]

My FPS is higher outside then indoors, I'm using the settings in the OP for the GTX 285, minus the skyrimperf.ini tweaks and the nvidia inspector (since I run ATI) plus x16af and x4aa.

I have a Phenom II x4 at 3.2, 4 gigs of RAM, and an ATI 4890. Running at 1600x900

This doesn't make any sense.

 

[MisterAnderson]

Does anyone have the slightest clue as to why the models (Skyrim logo in main menu, characters/armor/weapons on the loading screen) in the menu and loading screen suddenly appear extremely reddish to me? Everything in-game is fine...but it's as if the menu screen colors suddenly got screwed up.

 

[Mango Positive]

I woke up this morning, changed some things in my ini / inspector areas and now everything works. Until this morning, when I started a game, the screen would remain black, but I could hear sounds. I had to hit control, alt, delete and try to open the task manager about 4 times before the video would show up. I couldn't see fire & cobweb effects either. All better. Thanks for the wonderful thread.

 

[Durante]

You are giving advice that might cause people to then have systems that could crash / perform oddly. But hey, its just advice without telling people the potential ramifications I guess.

As I said, these cases won't be encountered unless you fill your whole 12/16/whatever GB of memory. And at that point a "normal" system with say 4 GB and the MS recommended 4 GB of page file would have crashed much earlier.

Also, since practically the only way of that happening is a runaway memory leak it would in most cases be preferable for the leaking application to die when it runs out of memory instead of the whole system slowing to a crawl due to excessive swapping.

By "perform oddly" I guess you mean "perform better", since that's the only possible outcome in terms of performance.

 

[Broder Salsa]

FINALLY!

My shadows have been fixed to my liking.

How how how how how?

 

[Dennis]

Moar shadow prOn

 

[Durante]

What's the range on that Dennis?

 

[Corky]

And other shadowrelated settings for that matter...

 

[indigo-cyclops]

For the page file situation, is it recommended for 8GB RAM AND ABOVE or just above 8GB? I'd be curious to see how it affects things but I'm only at 8GB...

Dennis, please tell your shadow settings?!

 

[Dennis]

What's the range on that Dennis?

fShadowDistance=4000.0000

The resolution is 8192

 

[Durante]

For the page file situation, is it recommended for 8GB RAM AND ABOVE or just above 8GB? I'd be curious to see how it affects things but I'm only at 8GB...

8 GB is an edge case. It depends on whether you ever use more than 8 GB or not (you can monitor the Commit (MB) stat on the performance tab in task manager to find out). The same is true for 12 GB and above, just that it's almost impossible to use that much unless you're running the 64 bit version of some very specialist applications.

Of course, you can always try it and set it back if you encounter any out of memory errors.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

You are giving advice that might cause people to then have systems that could crash / perform oddly. But hey, its just advice without telling people the potential ramifications I guess.

Hey, he's published papers at international conferences, so he must be right! Frank West has covered wars too, you know!

 

[Phandy]

I Just tried turning my paging file down.
I always assume having a lot was good, so I had 2 paging files of something like 6,000mb each.
I turned it down to 1 hard drive with 1-2000mb on it. And got a bit of a performance boost, was thinking maybe I could squeeze a bit more out. I am trying to up my 'minimum' fps which was dropping down to sub-20. I've now got it more or less 24+, hoping for a bit more.

Whats the most I could turn it down too without worrying about the stability of my windows?
I have 4gb of DDR2 ram. Have tonnes of HDD space across a few hard drives.

 

[MisterAnderson]

So just to experiment to try to solve this odd as hell issue of my Menu screen turning everything red, I deleted my Skyrim.ini (after backing it up) and re-ran the game. It was fixed and a new Skyrim.ini file was created, but with barely any modifiers in it.

Is there anything wrong with keeping it this way or should I re-paste in my old ini file and just try to figure out what I modified that screwed it up? How come there's barely any content in the new ini file?

 

[Onemic]

I've come to the conclusion that this game is simply terribly optimized. I get FPS drops in the most random of areas outdoors and even more baffling, increasing the the view distance in the settings to max for every option actually IMPROVES performance rather than make it worse. Granted I still get in the low 20's whenever I take these random hits in cities and other populated outdoor areas, but its still an FPS boost.

Using a 5770 BTW

 

[Durante]

You know, it would be nice if people had some actual arguments for why disabling the page file is bad, beyond the obvious "you may run out of memory" which I covered, and which is eliminated when you have 12+ GB and are even remotely aware of your memory use.

The arguments for it are the following:
- Less HDD traffic, which can lead to slower response times for applications that actually need to use the HDD (such as Skyrim, the reason I brought this up in the first place)
- Faster task switching, particularly to tasks that have been inactive for a longer time
- Slightly reduced system CPU load, since no component has to run that figures out what to page

@Phandy:
I wouldn't recommend going below 4 GB with 4 GB of RAM. What I would recommend is buying more RAM
Since you mentioned "a few" HDDs, you could try moving the page file only to one of them, ideally one that (a) Windows isn't installed on and (b) Skyrim isn't installed on.

 

[Betta Lines]

fShadowDistance=4000.0000

The resolution is 8192

You must be doing something else. My shadows do not look anywhere near as crisp as that with those settings.

 

[Phandy]

@Phandy:
I wouldn't recommend going below 4 GB with 4 GB of RAM. What I would recommend is buying more RAM
Since you mentioned "a few" HDDs, you could try moving the page file only to one of them, ideally one that (a) Windows isn't installed on and (b) Skyrim isn't installed on.

Thanks! RAM upgrading isn't an option right now since I'm on the verge of a whole mobo/cpu upgrade which means moving to ddr3. I can do both of the other two though which is good. Since I have 3 HDDs. I'll stick with 4gb's.
Cheers.

 

[DenogginizerOS]

These random CTDs are annoying.

 

[Corky]

You must be doing something else. My shadows do not look anywhere near as crisp as that with those settings.

somethings tells me we are all missing something, because people are getting different results with the "same settings", for me 4000 distance and 8192 shadowmap resolution ( among other settings ) still looks like garbage.

These random CTDs are annoying.

My crashes has decreased by 95% since I did the "soundfix" posted in the OP.