I summed up the problem in this thread.
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=65629
Basically the deferred rendering is more than 2 times slower for our project and I couldn’t get the directional shadows to look good up close by trying every possible combination of settings(shadow distance, cascades, etc).
Is there any chance of this being fixed before the release?
that it is slower is a fact, thats the consequence of deferred. But it scales better. That side has nothing to be fixed actually, its just the nature of how deferred is calculated.
the shadow quality indeed has a higher degree of feathered out at the time than it really should have but I doubt we will see a fix for that in the release version as it is no major thing and likely was reported with past betas already (either that or nobody cared about it as feathered shadows are kind of standard today. even high end like crytek has feathering, just not such high degrees of blocky aliasing). Also, unlike U2, you can now also use non-directional lights and get shadows that have any use 
Scales better to what? The number of lights? I’ve already tried this with the maximum number of lights that we’d be using for our game, and forward rendering wins by a huge margin.
We did have shadows from point and spot lights in unity 2.6 in forward rendering, why can’t we in 3.0?
If the shadow quality won’t be fixed until the release this is going to be a very disappointing case indeed.
The shadows do look good from distance, but the close up quality is just not acceptable.
I’d second that request. Please let us decide if shadows in forward rendering are too slow or not. They worked in 2.6
I also have a few scenes where forward works better and deferred is still bugged. Maybe this gets fixed before release, maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, forward with shadows is my only salvation.