First of all, I want to say how impressed I am with MSFS shadows. The scenery shadows are mindblowingly good when compared to X-Plane. But there is a technical issue. While scenery shadows are superb, they're lacking in the cockpit. X-Plane works around this by having a separate shadow res. inside the cockpit. In MSFS however, shadow map size seems global, hence the problems with cockpit shadows.

So, the settings dialog offers 2048px shadow maps, however the UserCfg.opt will accept higher values. I dialed in 4096 and boom, cockpit shadows are sharp. However, my sim CTD'd within minutes. I only tested this once, but since I don't have any CTD's in MSFS (unless I disconnect a USB controller device), I am pretty sure it was caused by the shadows.

So, but there's also the shadow distance value. Maybe 4096px shadows will be possible when lowering the distance a bit? Or what's with the other shadow settings? Maybe there is a multiplier only boosting cockpit shadows (hard to believe scenery shadows and cockpit shadows are 1:1)? Anyone wants to join me getting to the bottom of this? I think it's essential here to get data from more than one system, and I think there's something to gain here...

I posted about this last week. Not sure where.... But anyhoo.... You can put it up to 8192 too. But there are a few issues.

There are still a lot of cockpit shadows that are not affected and look horrid.

Also, going above 2048 hits FPS hard. Probably because it affects ALL shadows from what I can tell

Water, clouds etc. Not sure about terrain as they have a separate setting.

But it is not clear. Is it cloud shadows on terrain... or terrain on terrain etc.?

The shadow settings were a lot more detailed and obvious in P3D.

They should really look at this as it really is sub par.

I tried this (4096) no impact on fps for me but my cpu is limiting, lods are turned down  and the size  would be irrelevant to cpu.  

No crashes so far

The problem is that sometimes they look great, and sometimes it's flight sim 95...

22 minutes ago, SteveFx said:

I tried this (4096) no impact on fps for me but my cpu is limiting, lods are turned down  and the size  would be irrelevant to cpu.  

No crashes so far

What do you mean lods are turned down? 

I mean that because my cpu is so weak I had already reduced the two level of detail sliders to 80 and 90 which may reduce the amount that gets drawn  in the shadowmap.

 

Some don't like this method, but in FSX and P3d aircraft design it was possible to eliminate shadows from small buttons, knobs etc. These are nearly always the items which give off unconvincing and shimmering small shadows.