Blocky dynamics shadows in Mass Effect 1

[radekzwildy]

I have changed DephtBias to 0.005 from the default 0.3 in the BIOEngine.ini file. The shadows are visible now, but they're quite blocky (low pixels count). Is there any way to fix this?

[holger1405]

@radekzwildy 

1.0 should remove dynamics shadows completely, 0.005 is very low imho. 

You also could try:
BIOEngine.ini

[D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
DisableHWShadowMaps=False

[radekzwildy]

DisableHWShadowMaps=False seems to have no effect (or at least I cannot see it). I messed a bit with ShadowFilterRadius and DepthBias, here's the result - one is with 3.75 and 0.0048, respectively, the other with default 2 & 0.3.

[holger1405]

@radekzwildy 

Dynamic Shadows were always a problem in ME1.

All you can do is to tweak it to "as good as it gets".

[radekzwildy]

OK, it still looks better than without them. I will have to settle for what I have. I just wish there was a setting that would pump everything up. Some developers' choices (like limiting AF to x4) are strange and now the hardware is much more capable than it was over 10 years ago. There are many tweaks to the engine.ini file here and there, but they mostly make more harm than good... Why BioWare didn't make an "insane" setting that we would be able to use a few years after the game release - I don't know.

[Fred_vdp]

The blocky shadows were an even bigger problem when the game first launched because they would appear on characters' faces during cutscenes, which they "fixed" by disabling dynamic shadows in cutscenes.

Fortunately, there's a remaster coming out soon, but that comes with a price tag.

[radekzwildy]

The biggest problem is that I'd have to wait 3 months . I got ME2 on some sort of promotion for free quite a while ago, I didn't even run it, now I started and 10 minutes into game I was so thrilled that I stopped and got ME1 . By May I should be done with the whole trilogy. I really like it.

The cutscenes don't look bad, even by today's standards, its the TPP part that is really dated. While in Citadel it's not that bad, Eden Prime and Feros (that's where I managed to get so far) look worse than Quake 2...

[Fred_vdp]

Also, do you happen to have a somewhat recent AMD CPU? If so, you've got an even bigger surprise coming up, because the lighting engine will flip out once you reach a certain area on a planet called Noveria. Intel CPUs are fine, though.

[radekzwildy]

Nope, I have i7-6700, luckily . RX 570 seems to be doing fine, but I miss Radeon Image Sharpening that is available in DX9 for 5000 series and up. Currently prices of those (and generally all) cards are an absolute disgust, so will have to play as it is now.