Any way to disable shadows?

Community General Discussion
1

Is there any actual reason that we can’t just turn them off in WoW and Overwatch? They make my eyes sore and probably affect performance negatively considering the only substantial FPS difference I noticed in the past was on or off. Low to High never made a difference.

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2

In the System settings, under Graphics, right side under the Effects header, is Shadow Quality with six settings, from low, fair, good, high, ultra, then to ultra high. But “off” is not an option, of course, for reasons.

Are you saying that putting that to Low isn’t enough?

You could also lower the settings on the other items in that Effects list and see how that works.

/moo :cow:

3

While the extra frames would be nice, that’s not my main complaint. Some games are just easier on the eyes without shadows. Guess I’m just :b:itching because they took away the option since I’m used to playing without them.

4

Can you use blob shadows? They just look like a dark ellipse under things.
I thought there was a console variable to disable shadows.

EDIT:
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/CVar_shadowLOD
Evidently this may not work any more though… * shrug *

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5

Yes.

My character’s silhouette actually bugged my eyes for a while.

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6

Agreed. I’m not so much concerned about framerates. Eyesight issues for some people are why I’d like the option back to turn them off completely.

I mean, every single other MMO I’ve ever played-- and many non MMOs-- let you completely disable shadows. I don’t know why Blizz took out this option.

There are no more blob shadows and the Cvar changes don’t do anything now either. It’s frustrating.

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9

Unfortunately, Jim, it does not work.

I would absolutely love it if just the regular low quality Blob shadows came back instead of making me have to use dynamic ones. It may seem like nothing to others, and that’s understandable, but for me shadows are so annoying. They are an eyesore. They are used too much like “HEY LOOK WE CAN DO SHADOWS!!” and they are a resource hog, they are not even worth 5FPS. A good amount of times they don’t even behave like real shadows anyway, e.g. they’ll cast through solid stone and things like that.

I have a mid range rig and can run fine with shadows set to the lowest, but even if I had a $10,000 dream rig and the options for blob shadows, I’d select them.

Forcing dynamic shadows has been one of the most recent visual changes that I hate the most.

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10

Newer NVidia cards handle shadows very well.

11

I got a good boost in Legion, because turning the shadows all the way down turned them OFF.

You can only have a lot of things to LOW, in BFA.

12

I had a look at some more console variables over on the wiki site. Perhaps this one might do the trick (at setting 0):
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/CVar_extShadowQuality
It appears that this was the command that was added in Wrath that deprecated the previous one I linked.

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13

I tried and couldn’t get it to work. It just wont let me get plain blob shadows. Would appreciate if someone else tried as well and reported back.