If you think shadows are not important...

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Great image showing the effect of the building shadows!

 

Indeed the shadows are one of the greatest things that add immersion to this sim, in my opinion. I personally love the vegetation shadows just as much or more so than the building shadows; it can really make terrain look stunning in the right lighting.

[okupton 308]

Flyice do you think that I could get by on a gtx 660 with some payware and moderate settings? Or would I be getting pretty weak performance?

[FlyIce 354]

okupton, I really can't say much about it. My video card experiences so far are only limited to GTX 580 and 780ti and I haven't played with any other cards. All I can say it's that if I'm willing to sacrifice on not having terrain shadows and having autogen setting just one or two notches down, 580 can perform pretty well too.

By the way, since I using a big TV my resolution is always 1920x1080 which is not demanding at all,

[okupton 308]

Yea Im.on a 42 inch.plasma as well. Interested in different configurations since I'm in the market for a new gpu but dont want to whipe out my xmas bonus in a video card. What's your processor if I may ask

[FlyIce 354]

it's in My PC info. i5-2600k overclocked to 4.93GHz so probably it's one of the best matches to 780ti. I bought the 780ti superclocked with AC which is like $750. But based on all the reviews I read you can just get a 780 for $499 and it's not that much slower than the ti version anyway.

[okupton 308]

Not going for a 780. I was more interested in your statement about the 580. Thanks for the help though!

[Guest]

I have an i5 2500K @ 4.5 and a GTX580. I have all airplane shadows enabled (internal and external, both cast and receive), terrain cast and receive, buildings and vegetation cast only (although because of what probably is a bug buildings receive is clearly enabled anyway). Some other relevant settings: autogen at very dense, objects (or whatever you call them) at extremely dense. Tessellation one notch down. I applied the tweak which I posted about in the other topic so the terrain shadows cover a wide range (Ultra setting) but all other shadows are at Medium. With all this fps above New York (only FTX Global installed, no ther scenery or addon planes yet) is around 23. Above the mountains in Norway I get around 25. I tested with the limiter on 33 and unlimited and the latter seemed a bit smoother but that's hard to test.

 

So all in all the shadows do have a clear influence on performance but the sim is still very well flyable and usually everything is smooth. It's totally worth the drop in performance! I am planning to get a new GPU (probably the GTX780) and I am sure that will improve performance and even enable me to set some settings a bit higher.

[DarkstarF16 72]

I've found that with unlimited, I do get a small frame increase but at the same time, get some stuttering. Although I'm on an amd card I'm guessing that its performance is similar to Jeroen's I've ended up setting the counter to 33 which gives me a stable scene.

 

I'm not using vegetation shadows and have left tessellation at medium. All scenery sliders at max and building shadows on cast and receive. This is what it looks like in New York. The FPS on this is around 15-16 as I lose around 3-4 FPS due to the video programme. I took it to show the interaction of scenery shadows when your in the cockpit. It also shows the shadows on the buildings. I'm using the shadow settings J van E posted.

 

[Oliver Ooi 85]

As an artist, shadow to me is very important. When I played fsx in 2007, I thought, how can I live with those graphic? Without shadow, objects just look "floating" and unrealistic. In fact, I nearly switch to XP10 just because of the shadow and non autogen pop up. Now I know that in v2, the sun and moon can cast shadow, I wonder is there any other dynamic light possible in the new SDK? In XP10, you have thousands of dynamic light in a typical scene, though the lights are not casting shadow for performance issue). Imagine in v2, when you taxi your aircraft at night, the lights in the airport cast realistic shadow into the cockpit.