How can I fix Skyrim's bad shadows?

The standard blocky, scrolling shadows are unattractive and distracting. Several resources advocate INI changes, but with little or no explanation for what they do, and I haven't seen any change anyway. I'm hesitant to try cranking up the quality, as well, because I'm playing on a laptop.

Or, if not possible to make them look pretty, is it possible to disable them entirely?

the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim pc

Best Answer

First of, any kind of graphical calculation depends entirely on your laptop's specs. Assuming that even cranked up to eleven they still look blocky to you, then there's not much to do. The only thing you can try is to reduce the effort in calculating those shadows, by not calculating as much. This is where some changes in the Skyrim's .ini files would come in, as they enable a more fine-grained control on the distances envolved.

I haven't played Skyrim for some time, so I can't verify the correctness of this next solution, but according to this it is possible to disable shadows by simply modifying all shadow rendering distances to zero.

Go to SkyrimPrefs.ini and modify the following entries. As stated, this will disable the shadow rendering: