Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Technical problems Shadows are pretty demanding, curious

I can set everything in the game as high as it goes, but disable shadows and get a consistent 60fps.

If I turn on Shadows, even Low Quality, that drops to 33ish fps.

Are shadows processor or GPU taxing?

Shadows are demanding for most games, but try enabling Timeslice Shadow Update, and leaving shadows on high. I think it's the dynamic shadows that are demanding here, but not so much the shadows themselves.

This is pretty much true for every game. Especially game with lots of foliage. Take Lineage 2 for example. Back when it was newer, when I had Shadows on it would kill my performance, but turning JUST Shadows off, everything else can be at max and my computer was completely fine. It seems to be that way for every game. Whenever I have issues with performance, the first thing I do is remove shadows, and it usually nearly doubles the FPS.

Aren't shadows in most games handled by the processor and not the videocard? Sadly my processor is the bottleneck in my system , so shadows tend to kill me, but things run great if I turn them off =/

I only have a problem in the battle tower ... everywhere else in the game, even the fortresses are fairly lag-free, but the shadows in the tower bring it to a crawl Since it's not an area I have to fight in, it's no biggie, but dang it annoys me when I have to chase a platform operator around to open a dialog while lagging.

I believe so, because the Processor has to determine the bounds for the shadows themselves. The Graphics card will then render the shadows (Unless the game just uses a darkening color scheme system), doing so is a lot of calculations all at once, and usually the Processor is significantly less powerful than the Graphics card. As a result, the Processor gets bogged down on the Shadows and slows down the processing of everything else.

I found the shadows very realistic, very well done. I did decide to switch them off later in the game only because things could easily sneak up on me using the shadows for cover.