Anyone getting crap shadows outdoors?

Ulukai on 17/11/2011 at 17:16

Here you go, judge for yourself:

(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/650997586417778219/F11CA99B75D4CC78237CC0486B50F59EF002141A/) 1, (http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/650997586417769852/CD5E7C477EAA9AC71FD4908C4DB117A45D7A3FBB/) 2, (http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/650997586417762527/BFCA906C75B5BF844152A12CEC35CC1780852BA9/) 3

First one looks pretty blocky to me (Shadows set to High, no tweaks)

Sorry they're not great, it was raining in Skyrim and the only place it was sunny had a crap selection of trees.

Edit: I did notice last night some really blocky shadows on NPCs. Unfortunately, I don't have screencap of that.

Ostriig on 17/11/2011 at 21:28

Thanks dude! As you can see for yourself, yours are a lot better than mine, and now I've figured out why after hitting (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/16/skyrim-i-want-more-pretties/) this new tweaks article on RPS. Boils down to me being a dumbass and going "fuck you Skyrim, I am GTX570 hear me rowloror!" I started screwing around with the .ini and I changed the fShadowDistance variable from default 2500 to a whooping 8000, thinking all it would is increase the distance shadows are rendered at. Not quite, it does that, but the fidelity of the shadows also scales inversely proportional to the distance.

For what it's worth, after trying out some values I have to say that dropping it down to 1000 makes exterior shadows look superb, as good as interior ones, but unfortunately that draw distance is way too small. I've actually ended up returning to the default 2500, seems like the best compromise.

wonderfield on 17/11/2011 at 22:00

Quote Posted by zombe

O_O. Looks like Skyrim does not do proper shadow map filtering. Don't know anything about DirectX ... perhaps some earlier versions (9 and below perhaps) cannot do it. What DirectX version do you have?

Percentage-closer filtering is perfectly feasible in DX9. Skyrim runs in D3D9 regardless of OS or hardware. There is no alternative renderer.

Quote Posted by zombe

Ie. does Skyrim ever atempt to do proper filtering (aka, percentage closer filtering.

No. PCF is exceptionally expensive.

Quote Posted by zombe

Nvidia has hardware support for it but ATI does not and it must be emulated [patent issues iirc]

There is no 'percentage-closer filtering hardware'. It's a shader-based technique.

nbohr1more on 18/11/2011 at 02:24

To expand... It has been perpetuated by Nvidia developer relations that ATI hardware cannot do PCF. In fact, ATI hardware has had PCF support for generations using the same DX9 API backdoor as Nvidia.

Awhile back someone went through an cataloged a bunch of nvidia "The Way it's Meant to be Played" sponsored games that disabled PCF if ATI hardware was found. In every case, spoofing an Nvidia hardware ID made the game render shadows identically. In other words "Damned dirty horseshit" in the graphic card wars from Nvidia (as usual). :tsktsk:

Here is a Beyond 3D discussion about the the minor gotchas for ATI's PCF implementation:

(http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=52015)

...

Still, it is an expensive technique...