It's a shame that putting them on high completely tears up my FPS.

Keeping them on medium makes them absolutely hideous, but I can deal.

rcignoni

I've had this experience too but found a solution, so I thought I'd join up and share it with you. I discovered it's not the quality of the shadows that cripples the frame rate, rather the distance in which the shadows start to be rendered. After I fixed this I'm able to use Ultra Quality shadows at the same FPS as Medium (and everything else on the highest settings too).

The trick is to alter the following variables in the console:

gfx_SunShadowRange0

gfx_SunShadowRange1

gfx_SunShadowRange2

The first two control how far away the Shadow LOD changes and the last one (the critical one for the FPS hit) changes how far away the shadows start to be rendered. For example, *Range2 on medium is set at 20, whereas on Ultra the setting is 140! Start with settings of 4, 8 and 20 and see how you get on.

I haven't yet found a way of getting the game to remember these values so I have to enter them in via the console every time I play. I suspect the reason for the crappy FPS at stock High or above is a slow CPU. I have an Athlon64 X2 4800+ OC'd to 2.6ish GHz (from 2.4GHz). My GPU is a 1GB HD4850.

Obviously YMMV but hopefully you'll find this useful.

Pete.