how important are shadows to you in a PC game?

I really liked how the shadows were more realistic in AC: Syndicate. And this is a tech that is seen in more and more games these days.

But on the other hand, shadows is something you really don't notice after a while. And if my game runs slow, I can live with last gen shadows.

As long as it's not just a dark circle under somebody I really don't have a problem with worse looking shadows.

I nearly always drop shadows from Ultra to High even if I can run the game just fine. The visual hit is generally slight unless you have character close-ups but the fps gain is typically huge. In some games even Normal shadows don't look too different from High shadows when during typical gameplay. It's nearly always my go-to option for performance gains.

typically the highest shadow setting is super taxing on performance vs the 2nd highest w/o much of a gain in effect quality

@R4gn4r0k: Every time i see shadows the blob shadow always reminds me of my brother saying when resident evil 1 came out. First thing he said was. I see they cant do proper shadows yet then. lol.

Haha, it's like this shadow that is the exact same for huge characters, small characters ... or even a garbage can. Just this round, anonymous blob xD

I'll turn off soft shadows if I need to but no shadows at all is a bit of a turn-off for me. I'd rather turn off ambient occlusion (I usually don't like it anyway) or motion blur.

yea ambient occlusion is pretty much the process used to portray the shadows. they go hand in hand.

As long as there aren't really bad jagged lines on shadows I'm happy.

As long as it does not detract from the immersion, like it did on low with Witcher 3 character models in cutscenes, I dont really care much about shadows

i generally like to have shadows on in modern games.
but if its a choice between really jagged shadows or no shaodws then i will go with no shadows. on older games i used to turn the shadows off because they were crap. they werent good enough to add to the atmosphere or anything.

BTW did anyone else notice there are no demon shadows in Doom 2016? I understand it's not so much of a horror game as Doom 3, it's very old school in terms of gameplay and the environment looks very nice, but there outta be shadows, too.

depends on the game, if the game is graphically intensive I will set shadows to the max

I can never play a game without shadows,

But recently since last gen, PS3 and X360 era, the shadows got advanced that you dont notice the difference between Low and High settings, it isn't worth the performance hit.

I usually set the shadows option to low or medium. as I dont notice much difference from high or very high settings.

Same with AO, i usually set it to high or medium. I find it to be a waste of performance.

Shadows - first graphic setting that I'll lower should I need an increase in performance. I usually have it to medium settings - anything over doesn't make much of an impact on the actual looks of games for me.

While it's usually one of the first things I change to get more frames back, I still like to keep it as high as I can because shadows are cool.

Depends.

Very important, if most of the lighting is done with actual light sources, and darkness is a "default" state.

For me it is fairly important, but then again it depends on the kind of game, i played games where it is just awful to have no shadows. it gives you some extra atmosphere.

Look at Star Wars TOR no shadows and it is ridiculous without them.

decided to put on gears 1 ultimate from windows store yesterday. i decided i wanted to play it at 4k60.

i got a 980ti but its a bit weak for that.

i had to turn off shadows, ambient occlusion, AA and set antistropic filtering to 2x....lol

and i think its still better than 1080p60 with everything on.

ymmv

depends on the game. If it's got a film noir kind of look to it, or it's a stealth game, then very important. Then again I'm playing Aragami this month and the shadows are not exactly amazing on a technical front, but they do the job well enough (they're cel-shaded).

I think in games like the above, function is more important than how pretty they look.

In run-of-the-mill action games, I am generally too busy to admire detailed shadows.

To answer the question, yes, shadows are generally one of the options I will turn down if performance is rocky.

They are very important to me as they add to immersion and games just look really ugly to me without them. I cant play Arma 3 without shadows on and fps games that don't have a player shadow piss me off a bit.

Not important, I can live without shadows, the first thing I start to turn off/lower in graphics settings is shadows, it's nice addon but I prefer better textures and effects.

If it's a horror game in the dark or some other game that uses shadows as key gameplay then I won't turn it down.

Good example is FEAR series, Doom 3, Dead Space series.

Mark of the Ninja and other stealth games

They are important, but I prefer worse shadows if that grants me 60 FPS if I'm playing on PC with mouse and keyboard.

I like shadows but they are the first thing i lower if i need extra fps (sometimes shadows won't hurt my fps though). Same goes with ambient occlusion which is virtually useless in most games and i find a hard time noticing if its on or not unless i take a screenshot and compare it.

Use of shadows in games have come a long way though, older days in games in the early to mid 2000's, using shadows really killed the performance, but now its a very minor impact that sometimes don't even do a fps hit because it seems that gpus have dedicated processes to handle them so well.

Depends on the game also, if the use of shadows isn't optimized right it will destroy your fps. I notice it badly in games that use the cpu to handle shadows too much instead of the gpu and it can really cause problems. TERA, for some reason it uses the cpu to handle the way shadows work instead of using the gpu, and the game is already badly cpu optimized which causes using shadows even worse.

Good AA and Shadows is the first thing i want to see in my games. They aren't as important for multiplayer but a must for the single player.

at 4k i find AA blurs detail. but yes shadows look really cool in single player.

if a games good graphics won't matter too much.

i use reshaders/sweetfx on all my games. AA with some sharpening removes the blur completely.

Shadows are pretty important in some games. Horror games and darker games like Metro - shadows really make a difference. Sometimes they are not worth the big performance hit. I just tried "nightmare" shadows in DOOM, one level above ultra, and my FPS took a massive hit so I just leave them on ultra.

yeh the highest level details usually tend to be significant performance hit over the 2nd highest, while not sporting the same level of fidelity upgrade

It matters a lot when it's dark and the character is using a flashlight. The shadows can make or break the immersion. I'm playing Metro Last Light and STALKER: Call of Pripyat back to back. The shadows definitely play a big part in the immersion.