Has anyone managed to find a solution to jaggy/blocky shadows?

[chris2012]

From what i've been reading lately alot of people have issues with this, be it ATi cards or nvidia. I take it it's more of a issue in the game rendering technique used on the shadows themselves than the actual drivers/hardware. Maybe even a bit of directX involved ( something about shadows starting to be blocky after the 9.0c release).

Also read somewhere else that a solution would be to run rivatuner, open up 3d settings and select something along the lines of 24 z bit stencil shadow. I can't really test it myself since sadly i can't get rivatuner to work with my gtx560. I even tried the workaround with the power user inputting my forcedriverversion etc to my current driver.

Anyway i'm curious has anyone come up with any solution to this? None of those threads managed to get anywhere. Yet there seem to still be people here and there that aren't affected by these issues (some deadspace2 topic about this issue, everyone with blocky shadows and one posting a pic with smooth perfectly lined shadows). No explanation.

 

[gorcorps]

This person might be playing the game at a much higher resolution than you or the other player with blocky shadows.

 

[Rhezuss]

I witness this in many games I play (Two Worlds 2, Rift, Civ5 and others I don't recall).

I play at 1920 x 1080 with pretty much on the highest settings possible. Got a GTX 560 Ti @ 950/1100 which is near 570 performances.

I witnessed this first when I was playing Age of Conan ion DX10 mode.

Never could put the finger on the problem though.

 

[chris2012]

This person might be playing the game at a much higher resolution than you or the other player with blocky shadows.

Sadly this has got nothing to do with the resolution the game is being played at.

The shadows have a very weird behaviour as well (explained by the way the tech is being used) as in, it looks perfectly smooth from some angles and totally jagged from others. This is while you're sitting still and just rotating your camera around so there is no such thing as you moving around the light source.

 

[SunnyD]

It's an optimization thing. If the game supports stencil shadows, then it should look fairly good. But another thing to realize is that the shadow can only be overlaid over an existing mesh, meaning the less detail in the mesh, the blockier your shadow is going to be. Given terrain meshes are generally very coarse for optimization reasons, this is common.

Keep in mind that calculating shadows in realtime is very, very computationally intensive. There are several techniques to do it, but each of them involve tracking object movement, source lighting, destination meshing, edge sampling and other various features depending on how nice you want the shadow to look. Doing it for multiple objects means that much more work. Rather than get 2 FPS, most developers decide on an appropriate compromise: blocky shadows.

 

[SabreWulf69]

I get that sometimes in Fallout 3, in the water, the ripples look blocky / pixelated. Is extremely weird seeing something like that when your running a whole load of texture packs and modded INI files. I was pretty sure it was to do with shadowing, don't know I could be wrong, but what ever it is, it's weird and I don't like it :-S