pixelated shadows

[CordoganAir 55]

I've also noticed this and I've always had mine set on medium shadow quality. Haven't tried high yet though.

[Jim Robinson 122]

Oddly:

 

[GRAPHICS]
GROUND_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=2048

 

seems to have an effect on VC shadows as well, I actually dumb my shadows down to 1024 with that setting and then try to just view them passively (the jagginess isn't terribly noticeable if you're busy flying the plane). I pick up a couple frames doing that, especially on dusk flights with some SGSS in Nvidia Inspector and autogen trees cast shadows turned on. I assume they want a value that is "powers of two" so if you were to increase that value the next available value would be 4096. I've tried that and it's OK for screenshots in daylight hours but I tried a dusk "photoshoot" once at a very simple airport and I was seeing frame rates around 3-4 FPS with GROUND_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=4096. It still hurts a month later, lol. I guess just know that it's possible to increase the quality of the shadows with that setting but expect ramifications at certain times of day. If you want to do some really nice screenshots though you might try 4096 or even 8192 but I probably wouldn't leave it that way for normal flying. YMMV.

 

Jim

[RockOla 233]

This is a quick comparison I did yesterday.

 

What you see is :

 

- indeed the "GROUND_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE" applie to VC shadows

 

- there is visible aliasing up to 8192 which is a quite resource-intensive shadow size

 

- 8192 is the maximum ground shadow size, anything above will result in a global shadow

 

- traditionnal anti aliasing techniques (via the Nvidia Control Panel or nv inspector for example) won't apply to the shadows. Shadows are not objects, but "textures" and thus, cannot be anti aliased through a traditionnal post processing technique.

 

[Slayer 190]

Aren't shadows done with a shader? Otherwise there would have to be texture files for every possible light angle etc. and there isn't. Shadows work on older planes for FSX where there was no shadow until the recent Steves Fixer (DX10)

 

I'm thinking the texture size is the rendering output of the shader so the shader doesn't get AA because both the AA and shader are post processed in the texture pipeline?

 

So in the pics above your not seeing more AA you are seeing a higher resolution output from the shader as such it is a finer detail just by being higher resolution.

[Jim Robinson 122]

I gotta say the 512 shadow size looks pretty good, more like an occlusion than a shadow really, but it's too blurry to be pixelated, lol.

 

Thanks for that comparison RockOla, that's awesome :smile:

 

EDIT: BTW I just happen to have a similar .gif of a CLOUD_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE comparison, sorry off topic but sorta fits and it was already done: