Shadow maps: What am I doing wrong

I just can't get shadow maps to work well.

I'm running an overclocked 5850 for crying out loud.

It's just too often in some zones occasional hard spots rack my FPS from 50s down to 10s for no apparent reason.

Like staring at a corner at a building. Everything should be obscured.



I think the ultimate problem with the shadow maps is the fact that it tries to include far too many objects into the map.

There's been times where I hit a slow spot, walk around a building, walk for like 500 ft and find tons of objects and just wonder why those are getting calculated into the map (if they are).



I've tried all kinds of settings, but it's ONLY shadow maps that slows me down... ever.


Could there be a setup issue with my card?
Could there be something I could fix.


Currently I'm running the 10.3 drivers, which saw a big boost in framerate over pre 10 drivers.

First, update to the 10.4 drivers.

Second, download and run CoH Helper and paste the results into a reply.

Also, see here.

Also, shadow maps enable the 'sculpted' shadows for all entities. In I16 that walking dude on the street didn't have a shadow. Now he can, and mapped shadows means he does. Hundreds of extra entities throwing shadows.

There's definitely some issues with lazy rendering.

1. Often time, items well outside world detail range are calculated when shadow maps are active. You know, I seriously don't care if a shadow pops into range when moving, the whole point of world detail is to have things pop into range.

Solution: If it isn't rendered, don't calculate it's shadows.

2. Far too many times things are rendered when they cannot be seen.

Solution: If I'm looking at a wall that fills my screen, don't render things behind it.


I know the game incorporates lazy rendering effectively. However there are far too many holes.

Honestly, I feel that if it's obscured from view, it's shadow shouldn't be calculated. I know this would lessen realism, but I would like that option. I know it would speed things up drastically.

Have you ever noticed that when you are standing in the shadow of a tree and can't see the tree, you can still see it's shadow?

Or, you can see the shadows of objects that are around the corner of a building, but you can't see the object casting the shadow?

Would you rather these shadows pop in/out as these objects become visible/become obscured or out of view?

Also, determining if an object is obscured is not cheap/easy.

In practice, it does sound easy. In reality when you try to implement it, it is not nearly that straightforward and not that easy to get working at a decent frame-rate.

If the performance if shadow maps is unacceptable, you can always fall back to the stencil shadows (this is the legacy shadow mode from pre-I17).

Some of the potential issues have already been addressed. The 10.2 and 10.3 drivers contained several issues with Ultra Mode. Most of those issues were addressed in the 10.4 release, so you do need to update your drivers.

That being said, I know that on the 10.4 drivers, a single RadeonHD 5770 can drive a 1920*1200 resolution with all Ultra-Mode features maxed when backed with a Phenom 965, and Ambient Occlusion set to High Quality. So, that leads me to believe we need some more information about your computer.

First: what operating system are you running?

Second: what resolution is your display?

Third: do you have any custom settings enabled in the Catalyst Control Center? E.G. Catalyst Control center will let you set various Anti-Aliasing options such as Multi-Sample, Adaptive Multi-Sample, and Super-Sample AA, as well as AA types such as Box, Narrow-Tend, and Wide-Tent... all which can have crushing effects on your system performance.

Forth: Temperature Settings. Shadow Maps are really hard-hitting on a GPU. If you got one of the cheap 5850's, it's possible that the card simply can't exhaust enough heat and is down-clocking. Utilities like GPUZ can monitor the temperature while you are in game: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219502

Also, shadow maps are very CPU intensive. Having a faster CPU (and/or more memory) may help improve the frame rate when shadow maps are enabled.