High Vs Medium Shadows

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

What the flip is the difference?!

Lol

I'm still trying to set up ED for good performance Vs visuals on my newish GTX 770 2Gb.

Shadows seem to effect the performance the most.
If I set it to high, stations drop my FPS down to 30fps (even with v sync off).
Medium has almost zero performance impact at all, and my FPS rockets up to well above 60 in a station.

FPS in space is just insane above 140fps with either. Probably because there's nothing to shadow. Lol

But I can't tell the difference in visuals either way. Lol

Anyone got any comparison shots?

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[the100thmonkey]

I've noticed that the draw distance for shadows is much shorter when you take the setting off ultra - if the sun is behind you as you approach a station, you'll see the client start drawing shadows as you approach the mailslot. That won't happen at ultra - they're drawn much earlier.

Dropping shadow quality makes a massive difference to FPS on planet surfaces too.

 

[777Driver]

Anti aliasing being added to shadows

Med - rubbish
High - rubbish
Ultra - Not bad

There used to be a config adjustment to increase the shadow quality on planets.

Ambient occlusion is a frame rate hog on low/med gaming rigs, might be better for some to try switching that off and using the extra fps to up the shadows

 

[Jukelo]

If you can't go for ultra, you might as well drop to med or low as there's not much difference with high.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Ultra and high tank my FPS on planets and stations.

But medium is perfectly fine and almost has no effect at all.

I need a setting between medium and high. Lol

 

[dmulligan]

It seems to make a major difference in the quality of the shadows cast by the bars outside of the mailslot. With shadows set to anything but ultra the shadow cast from the bars is a completely unrealistic checkerboard pattern. It is possible that the ambient occlusion setting is involved in this as well as I think I raised both settings at the same time.

 

[JRok]

Ultra and high tank my FPS on planets and stations.

But medium is perfectly fine and almost has no effect at all.

I need a setting between medium and high. Lol

You can dot that... just select "High", then hit the "+" to the left of "Quality" and tweak the individual settings you want and it will change the quality to "Custom".

 

[777Driver]

You can dot that... just select "High", then hit the "+" to the left of "Quality" and tweak the individual settings you want and it will change the quality to "Custom".

You can't adjust the shadow quality setting, it is either low,med,high,ultra.

As mentioned, you can trick the menu by adjusting the config files. For example ultra works fine in space, but tanks the fps on planets, you can copy the med settings to the ultra settings for planatery shadows, giving you ultra in space but med when you arrive at a planet.

 

[fabittar]

You can't adjust the shadow quality setting, it is either low,med,high,ultra.

As mentioned, you can trick the menu by adjusting the config files. For example ultra works fine in space, but tanks the fps on planets, you can copy the med settings to the ultra settings for planatery shadows, giving you ultra in space but med when you arrive at a planet.

Thank you. Good idea.