For some reason I only discovered this tonight.  

 

A few comparison pics of the visual difference and fps difference between terrain shadows off and on (30km)

 

I literally have my fps cut in half for the most part.  Is this the same on everyone's rigs?

 

ON ~ 56 FPS

 

 

OFF ~ 115 FPS

 

 

 

 

 

 

upgrade gpu

Someone (I think it was Rob Ainscough) observed at one time that he got better terrain shadow performance with the slider all the way right. You could give that a try - it might still apply.

Terrain shadows creates stutters for me, besides dropping fps. It seems less of an issue if I disable DSR.  I have to say though, that terrain shadows is no big loss really. It improves the experience negligibly imo. 

It would be good to know the location too. However here does it the same in Norway. 87 vs 125 on a GTX980 with unlocked FPS. It only shows how much GPU power new "features" take.

Even if you look at it at a different angle, you can see how GPU load goes up: at 30fps, same situation, turned off 13% GPU load, turn it on, 35%!

I did go from a 570 to a 970 ... It didn't help that much. It still amazes me how much cpu these visual features use.

 

I agree the terrain shadows don't do much

 

This is at KAVX, with Aerosoft's freeware LA Cities demo Catalina Is.

I rarely use terrain shadowing - it isn't worth the drop in performance for me. All looks lovely without it anyway!

I turn mine off in P3D and Xplane, gave me nice lift

Do you guys mean cloud shadows in terrain or terrain shadows

Try lowering the GROUND_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=xxxx in the cfg. (1024,512,256) etc

Try lowering the GROUND_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=xxxx in the cfg. (1024,512,256) etc

 

But then your VC shadows will be so serrated you'll cut yourself on them. :( 

 

gb

What surprises me in those screenshots is without terrain shadows it still looks good so I guess it's up to the simmer.  I use it usually set at 10,000 and when I am flying in the afternoon but right now I am trying it at max 80,000 and I think Rob may be onto something.  I was expecting a dramatic drop in FPS but no... the same if not maybe a bit better?  Try it yourself.  Need to do more flying with it though.

In this scenery it looks fune without them i agree.  I was just surprised at the difference.

Do you guys mean cloud shadows in terrain or terrain shadows

 

Terrain shadows

What surprises me in those screenshots is without terrain shadows it still looks good so I guess it's up to the simmer.  I use it usually set at 10,000 and when I am flying in the afternoon but right now I am trying it at max 80,000 and I think Rob may be onto something.  I was expecting a dramatic drop in FPS but no... the same if not maybe a bit better?  Try it yourself.  Need to do more flying with it though.

 

The problem with turning up the draw distance but not the number of cascades (shadow quality) is that the resolution of the shadows will drop. I find that anything above 30km requires you to max out the shadow quality slider, or you'll get shimmering, low-resolution shadow maps.

 

 

I did go from a 570 to a 970 ... It didn't help that much. It still amazes me how much cpu these visual features use.

 

I agree the terrain shadows don't do much

 

This is at KAVX, with Aerosoft's freeware LA Cities demo Catalina Is.

 

 

I've been wondering whether terrain shadows are mainly CPU bound or GPU bound. The only thing that brings the FPS down for me in P3D v2 is really the shadows. I'm currently running a GTX 670 and a 4770K at 4.5 GHz and I've been trying to figure out whether it's worth upgrading to a faster GPU. If terrain shadows are still using mainly the CPU I might just stick with the 670 for now and hope LM continue to optimize the rendering engine.