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 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.
