It’s 2024. They would be extremely useful for open world games, and would improve shadows quality for all games anyways. Some games like Genshin Impact have modded the engine to have 8 Shadow Cascades.
Give us 8+ Shadow Cascades.
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+1
8K shadows are allowed now in URP, but more cascade options might also be interesting
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Didn’t know, thanks! Although 8k textures might be too much for older devices instead of multiple cascades right?
I’m not sure which is heavier to run tbh
You probably don’t understand all the consequences.
- x8 drawcalls
- open world games has more drawcalls → even more performance drop.
- x8 shader texture reads/more instructions and branches
- 8k shadowmap cost 128 Mb. 8 cascades = 1 gb VRAM only for shadows.
- ram bandwidth 60 GB/sec at 60 fps. GTX 3060 has limit 240 gb. 25% bandwith only for shadows? Too much.
therefore, 8 cascades are not used in games
Raytraced shadows/screen space shadows/contact shadows/virtual shadow maps allow you to draw shadows at any distance without x8 drawcalls and 1gb vram.
For example screen space shadows in skyrim
GIF
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Thanks for the answer, the problem is, that Raytraced shadows/screen space shadows/contact shadows/virtual shadow maps are not available in URP.
Raytraced shadows would consume 100 times more anyways.
Contact Shadows would only be useful for well, contact shadows.
Also maybe I do want to use 1 gb of VRAM on shadows. I don’t want Unity to make design decisions of my projects for me. I like to f*k around and find out, this way I can learn from my mistakes or maybe even learn how to use them to my advantage.
Available.
Inline raytracing can works on builtin-in, urp, hdrp
https://discussions.unity.com/t/925289
built-in example (https://github.com/INedelcu/InlineRayTracingShadows/tree/main), but it can be easily adapted for urp.
No.
x8 drawcalls can have more performance drop then DXR shadows.
In most of games RTX/DXR with full raytraced stack (shadows+global lighting + reflection) cost 30-50%. Why rtx shadows only cost 100 times more?
Did you see this shadows from the trees? Is it bad? It’s the same result as cascades shadows.
GIF
What about performance, I think they must. In other cases we will have 90% of unity games with 32 cascade shadows with 32k resolution textures everywhere.
Most developers never think about performance.
No one will play your game if it has 100500 cascades and it slows down on a gtx 4090
Just select HDRP if you preffer best quality instead of performance. Why did you select urp and trying to achive hdrp shadows quality?
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Hey thanks for the info, didn’t know they were developing this features in 2023.2. However all of this raytracing features only work well on computers with a GPU with Raytracing Cores. I’m using URP because I want to be able to target any hardware I wish. Changing to HDRP adds a bunch of new features that significantly slow down the game without doing anything. For example the way light behaves is completely changed and it kills my GPU instantly.
My mistake on the contact shadows btw. The name made me think it was the shadow created when two objects get in contact but that’s ambient occlusion. I’ll take a look to the link you sent me about that, although I’d prefer to have a simple Unity setting to toggle on and off, as I don’t know shader lab and I rather not download plugins from online that I don’t know what they do under the hood.
On the last thing: “What about performance, I think they must. In other cases we will have 90% of unity games with 32 cascade shadows with 32k resolution textures everywhere.
Most developers never think about performance.
No one will play your game if it has 100500 cascades and it slows down on a gtx 4090”.
There are tons of games that are completely unoptimised with Unity that run awfully and have a ton of stuttering. What Unity does on this end is irrelevant, if you are a newby/bad developer you are going to screw up the game somehow.
Maybe every single part of my game is super optimised and I want to spend those performance gains on having extremely crisp shadows for some reason. Who knows maybe I intend to use shadows as a game mechanic and I need them to be sharp but “oh no, the Unity developers assumed that I would never need them and that I am a bad developer so they didn’t give me the option to begin with.”
well, as soon as you would get 8x shadow cascades this wouldn’t be possible anymore lol, 4 is more than enough with proper cascade adjustment
The player can increase and decrease shadow cascades by adjusting shadow quality from settings. Thus allowing the game to be played on low end devices and to look good in higher end devices. “4 is more than enough with proper cascade adjustment” hey, because you can’t imagine how something could be a problem, that doesn’t mean that a problem can’t arise anyways. In my case, in the type of open world that I’m working on and the type of gameplay I’m doing it’s been a big struggle for a variety of issues, that would be solved easily with a larger cascade amount.
open world = high cpu usage, 8x cascade drawcalls = ridiculous cpu usage
it’s not that i can’t imagine it, i just can’t imagine how you’re supposed to make an open world game with so little resources left after shadows only. even using something like pcss would probably look just as good for cheaper. i’m in the camp that more is not always better and simply brute forcing quality gives you less difference than something like art direction or level design does. most players see a shadow and don’t think anything of it. (the same players who may not even think to adjust the settings, and would either assume the game runs bad or looks bad depending on your preset values.)
i’m not trying to be snobby, i just think us developers spend so much time being perfectionists that we forget that most of the people we’re developing for don’t know what aliasing or peter panning is, and are a lot more focused on what they’re supposed to be doing in the game. if it’s shiny they’re probably happy 
a great example is destiny 2, the shadows are really low resolution, but they’re blurred so much you can’t really tell unless you’re staring
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