8600gt hates shadows?

[Kingofpain]

f.e.a.r is where it started, i was having trouble running the game on LOW settings but i found that alittle weird considering i could play most other games of today at high with aa and af full.

so i was determined to get it running, what i found was shadows.. and not soft ones, as they were always turned off, just normal shadows were the enemy everything else can now go up to high with full aa/af and plays nicely, but for some reason if i turn shadows up it lags like horse in snow even when all other settings are low.

this goes for all my other gfx intense games nwn2 and oblivion etc anyone know why the 8600gt's hate shadows so much? drivers maybe?

[staffsMike]

As you suggest it's probably just the driver.

[kalniel]

It's just lack of graphical power. Shadows are quite intensive to draw (they are always extra render passes, and often more than one). Sadly the 8600gt isn't that good a card.

[s_kinton]

I would also say its probably down to both drivers and lack of rendering power.

[Kingofpain]

can it still be lack of power when everything else is on low even res, but only shadows up? also for some reason after i installed splinter cell double agent it read my pc as having all the req's except for gfx drivers is it incompatible with 8 series or something never heard of it being so before (i have tried msi drivers and nvidia forceware etc)

also for other games i can have all the settings up even shadows and soft shadows but it causes lighting to appear/disappear/reappear where it shouldnt have.
looked through other forums and patches for the game but none reported if its not drivers then i may have a card that got knocked around a few too many times during delivery...

[kalniel]

I doubt it's broken - when cards break they generally stop working althogether, not work at reduced speeds/functionality.

It can still be lack of power when other details are low - the way shadows are calculated can use different functions of a graphics card. Sometmes it's extra passes loading up stencil models (Doom3 engine), sometimes it's shader based (Oblivion, NWN2). Both take up a lot of video memory/bandwidth. In the stencil model case the 8600gt is especially hampered by the 128bit memory link, in the shader case it's more limited by shader core speed. In *both* cases you're also going to be limited by your CPU, as shadows also take additional CPU processing.

Driver optimisations can help, and shadows are often targeted because they are so intensive to draw (bring on real time ray tracing please!).