I admit, I turn off shadows or I lower them to simple when I play games.

[Rage187]

I just can't justify the performance hit by having them turned on or set to anything higher then low detail.

I do not even miss them when they are off, hell, who plays a game to look at shadows?



It might be different if I was running at a lower ress, but at 1920x1200 shadows are too much of a luxury.




AMD 3800X2
BFG 7800gt
1 gig pc3200

1920x1200, HIGH QUALITY, 4aa 8as. All other graphics settings set to highest quality, and I turn shadows to minimal or off. The performance increase justifies the lack of shadows.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: Rage187
I just can't justify the performance hit by having them turned on or set to anything higher then low detail.

I do not even miss them when they are off, hell, who plays a game to look at shadows?



It might be different if I was running at a lower ress, but at 1920x1200 shadows are too much of a luxury.




AMD 3800X2
BFG 7800gt
1 gig pc3200

1920x1200, HIGH QUALITY, 4aa 8as. All other graphics settings set to highest quality, and I turn shadows to minimal or off. The performance increase justifies the lack of shadows.

I always disable shadows. I dislike them so far in every game I have played, except Fear.

 

[5150Joker]

The shadows in BF2 look like crap anyway and I found they give a huge performance penalty so I tend to keep them on low or turn them off. Everything else is set to high with 4xaa/8xaf.

 

[Cobalt]

They are essential when I play Source (don't much though), especially in scrims. It can give you that little advantage when their shadow comes out before they do, or when someone is camping behind a box but their shadow sticks out.

 

[CP5670]

I turn down or disable the shadows in many games because of the big performance hit they always seem to carry, but they work really well in some types of games (SCCT and Doom 3 for example). Soft shadows are out of the question for me though. In Far Cry, I have them turned down for both performance reasons and the fact that the real time generated ones look so bad on Nvidia cards that it looks better not to have them at all.

 

[Rage187]

I'm glad I'm not alone

 

[BFG10K]

I've been doing this since the dawn of time as the performance you save can often gain 1-2 notches of resolution. Most world shadows don't tend to be affected anyway, just the dynamic shadows under monsters' feet.

 

[SonicIce]

How big of a hit is it in UT2004 on a 6600 GT?

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: SonicIce
How big of a hit is it in UT2004 on a 6600 GT?

It'll play fine.

UT2k4 is one of the those awesomely coded games that allows you to play smoothly @ maxed rez & settings on a high end system, or at low settings & rez on a lower end system.
What i'm trying to say is that it scales very well.

Also, it's extremely CPU dependant (much more-so than GPU dependant), so a 6600GT will be fine.

 

[JBT]

If I need to Shadows are the first to go. In CSS though, I do like thme on. They do give a pretty good advantage. In pretty much everything else though they ussually arn't needed in mulitplayer games.
In single player games I care just a little bit more.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
I've been doing this since the dawn of time as the performance you save can often gain 1-2 notches of resolution. Most world shadows don't tend to be affected anyway, just the dynamic shadows under monsters' feet.

Interesting.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: Rage187
1920x1200, HIGH QUALITY, 4aa 8as. All other graphics settings set to highest quality, and I turn shadows to minimal or off. The performance increase justifies the lack of shadows.

I bet you don't run FEAR at those settings .

 

[Spacecomber]

With BF2, I got a pretty good performance boost going from High to Medium with Dynamic Shadows (about 6 fps, on average), but I didn't see much difference going from Medium to Low. I had to go all the way to Off before I picked up another nice gain (another 6 or 7 fps), but doing so is a little too harsh; so, I'm sticking with Medium.

I think its pretty cool when I see the shadow moving across the ground from a helicopter that is circling overhead, for example.

 

[dug777]

i like them myself

run them in the FEAR MP demo, and everything i can, thats partly why i'm so ticked off about the farcry nvidia problem, i thought the dynamic vegitation shadows on arms/gun were the coolest thing since sliced bread when it came out, and i still do

 

[Vernor]

Hell, I don't even notice/care jaggies at 1024x768 or above.

 

[Nirach]

Shadows?

In games?

Why bother?
Why would you be going 'oo, arr' at shadows in games, when you can be shooting people with bullets the size of their legs?

 

[Zenoth]

Depends if the game is well coded / optimized for Shadows.

I think the best example I can see here is how well nVidia's Ultra-Shadow helps it out in Doom 3.

And perhaps an even better example, would be Painkiller (with or without Battle Out Of Hell expansion). That game scales even better than UT 2004 or even Half-Life 2. Hell I can play it at 1600 x 1200 on my Radeon 9800XT system with 30+ frames-per-seconds with rare, very rare slow downs.