Quake3World

Shadows really seem to bring my fps down A LOT on my 2.8ghz p4, 1 gig ram, x850 pro... when I turn shadows off the game still looks great and I get an extra 10-15 fps. What I want to know is... are shadows cpu or gpu intensive? I'm thinking CPU... what do you guys think?

I think it is mostly CPU, at least for D3/Q4 engine. I turn shadows off as well for my AMD2600, 1.5GB RAM, nVidia 6600 w/256. I can go from 800x600 to 1024x768 without significant change in FPS.

The D3 engine, even moreso than any of the previous id based engines, really requires some config tweaking well above and beyond the Low, Medium, High and Ultra settings via menu.

*cough* from my not to intune knolage with this, i think the Shadow's need to be Cycled through the Cpu, then rendered in real time through the videocard.

so i would feel that it fits both hand in hand, persionally i turn them off.. useless feature anyway

IIRC, it depends somewhat on your video card and drivers: some have better and more extensive support for hardware shaders, which speeds up shadowing, than others. But the CPU is definitely involved quite a bit.

i personally turned off itemshadows in the console. playershadows are still there then.. it helped me a few times already :icon14:

I'm preety sure they use an algorithm to display shadows as opposed to a GPU feature. So in essence, yes, its CPU dependent.