Is anyone able to get good performance with shadows?

[LaForge]

My Firefox has Lazarus which backs up all form data, so I'm going to post this again. Thanks to the peeps who replied before the rollback.

Just wondering if anyone at all can get stable and high FPS using even the most basic shadow mode, and what kind of hardware you have.

I have an ATI Radeon HD5870, with a Q6600 core up to 3.5ghz, with 8GB of ram. I can't run the lowest shadows without significant performance loss. I'm sure this was probably covered a lot on the previous forums, but the search turns up little on the subject currently.

Also, I absolutely love the new forums, extremely functional, next-level stuff. (This seems almost sarcastic now, but really, they are nice).

 

[DukeofRealms]

Doesn't seem sarcastic to me.

 

[RedDragonflyxx]

Yes, I have a gaming laptop (MSI GT70) with i7-4700MQ CPU GTX 770m GPU and 12GB RAM (8GB RAM are dedicated to Stramade, 4 initial and 2 early gen. Is that overkill?)

 

[Commodore]

Shadows cut my framerate in half. At least interiors look good with shadows off.

 

[SkullCollector]

I have shadows set to Best and my FPS limited to 60 (unleashing it makes my GPU go into a weird overdrive, resulting in a high-pitched noise). Unless several multi-hundredthousanders are present, frames keep snuggling with the 60, but rarely less than 45.
For testing purposes I unlimited the framerate and got up to 80 with shadows (120 max without objects displayed), ~600 without shadows. This was with two medium ships and a default station on-screen.
So yes, the performance hit is significant.

i5-2500k @ default clock
GTX560 Ti Phantom, 1GB
8GB RAM
no SSD
Realistic textures at 128x128 resolution