quick noob question (shadow cache)

[nonce basher]

What exactly is shadow cache? And what does it do? Why do people claim it has such a performance boost? Does it hinder the visuals in any noticeable way?

Does it store shadows in your vram once you move to a different room, and when you return it doesnt have to load it again? That would but my guess, but I dont know...

[b2007929]

I have read that the setting increases VRAM usage, therefore it can cause stuttering if you're running out of video memory.

[Drowning witch]

it does what it says, it caches shadows in the VRAM. I have not noticed any visual changes or issues. but the difference on my 970 is constant 60 with shadow cache OFF, or occasional stutters and FPS drops with it ON, at least in the demo.

It's the first setting you should disable on a 4gb GPU, especially if you max everything else out.

[Dwayne]

to cache is to keep in memory

this means the shadow renderer produces some reusable content and thus can be cached if you have enough memory, and should increase performance in theory

my best guess

[nonce basher]

Im kinda suprised this got bumped. But thanks guys, It's turned off. No difference at all.

If anyone is curious, Im running this maxed with shadows on high and TAA. looks better than SMAA imo. Stable 60fps whith zero stutter so far at 1920x1080.

i5 3570k @ 4.5ghz, 16 gig ddr3 ram, 780ti 3gig

[El Fuerte]

Originally posted by Dwayne:

to cache is to keep in memory

this means the shadow renderer produces some reusable content and thus can be cached if you have enough memory, and should increase performance in theory

my best guess

It indeed increasese fps. But at the cost of some stuttering

[Drowning witch]

Originally posted by JamesFrancoSingingBritneySpears:

Originally posted by Dwayne:

to cache is to keep in memory

this means the shadow renderer produces some reusable content and thus can be cached if you have enough memory, and should increase performance in theory

my best guess

It indeed increasese fps. But at the cost of some stuttering

I guess that depends on the rest of your components. on my rig, there's no stuttering with the shadow cache off.

[Panic Fire]

With shadow cache on it puts shadow maps on your vram. If you have enough vram for them it will increase performance. If you don't have enough vram it will cause stuttering.

Turning off shadow cahce will mean when shadows are rendered they will be pulled from your harddrive/ssd, sent though your northbridge to your GPU and then rendered directly. This means you will have 4 differnt pieces of hardware, north bridge, cpu, gpu, and storage device all limiting your framerates. If all of these things are good you won't see any big performance hits. If one of them is bad you can clearly see performance hits. Shadow cache puts it all on the vram which means when it appears in game its directly rendered from vram skipping all of the other components entirely. Hence better performance.

If you have vram space use shadow cache. If you don't have vram space don't. If you see performance hits turn down shadows till your system can handle them with either solution.