Turning Off Dynamic Shadows

So I guess the issue im having is that when playing vegetation heavy maps I tend to get less of a frame rate than what I want. I get plenty of frames when I set lighting to lowest but I would like to see some shadows to begin with while playing through the scenarios in the game. I was wondering if there was a way in the editor (pardon me if I say this wrong) to bake the shadows to the map rather than having them dynamic?

In case if you are curious of my specs.

Intel i7 3770k Oc'd @ 4.0 Ghz
16 GB DDR3 Ram
Nvidia GTX 980
1920x1080 (Native)

 

The real problem is poor graphical optimization.

We're getting DX11 soon, so that should improve performance a bit.

In the mean while, you can significantly improve performance by lowering shadow resolution. In the editor, find sunsky and scoll down through its properties until you find the shadow resolution, by default set to 1024. You can change it to 512, 256 or even 128.

 

Just tried that out and I did not see much of a difference in framerate in a shadow intense scene. I have played with the different lighting quality option and have not seen much of a improvement either untill shadows are off. What is the main culprit here about the shadows that are such a killer?

 

The drops you are seeing are not exactly always due to shadows. It's all down to draw calls. The more objects on screen, the lower the framerate. Mesh settings generally help the most, albeit with a huge visual impact. Turning off shadows also turns off SSAO and more advanced shading so it's more down to as mentiond before, draw calls.

DX11 will help with reducing draw calls, but before that I can't really help. Also, I would think that a 980 could hold above 60 all the time; my 970 only drops to 48 at worst.

So, in the mean time;

disable SSAO
disable dynamic reflections (they have the hardest hit to performance overall)

 

Disable HDR, SSAO, Lower Textures, Mesh quality, and lighting.