Horrible shadows in URP

Hi. For whatever reason I seem can’t get good quality soft shadows in v6 URP. Even with shadow resolution cranked up all the way to 4K shadows still appear jagged, please see the screen below. Only jumping to 8K shadow resolution makes the shadow edges nice and smooth. Which makes no sense, why would you need shadow resolution almost 4x over actual viewport resolution to get nice shadows?

I have a relatively small scene, just a bunch of unit sized cubes on a floor plane. Camera render distance capped at 0.01 - 10.0 only. Tried all sort of settings with multiple and single cascade but can’t really get anywhere with it.

Highest tier “PC_RPAsset” RP asset
Lighting Mode = realtime
Soft Shadows = on
Shadow Resolution = 4096
Quality = High
Max shadow distance = 10
Cascade count = 1
Depth bias = 1
Normal bias = 0

Struggling to figure what is going on. I think I’m missing something rather obvious. Any ideas please? Getting much nicer softer shadows in other engines.

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There seems to be some shadow leakage as well. Change the depth bias and normal bias to work around that.

For soft shadows, did you also change the shadow quality on the light itself?

Yes, Soft Shadows are enabled. Both in light and render asset properties. Also fiddled with both Depth and Normal biases. The best result seems to be Depth bias of close to zero like 0.1 and Normal bias of 0. But still not getting nice smooth shadows.

Wonder if this is a Mac only issue in V6. Or it works as expected in Unity, idk. In Godot I can get much nicer smooth shadows on a super simple small scene like that.

Sounds weird, but maybe reduce shadow resolution or increase distance?
In general soft shadows blurs the shadow texture. So if you got an insanely sharp texture to start, it might still be sharp. Not ideal, that’s true.

HDRP has capsule shadows and more high quality shadow settings.
Or 3rd party assets like Umbra Soft Shadows

And it would be nice if you could share the setting om the directional light to double check (p.s. only 1 additional light can use shadow cascades, and no additional lights. It’s usually set up this way, but good to check)

Just don’t use URP, I had the same problem. Tried every single thing imaginable and nothing changed. Shadow resolution at 8096 and still not that great looking shadows.

The only way to solve it is to use built-in renderer… I don’t understand how they want to even remove the built-in render in the following engine versions.

Huh, you are absolutely right LePaithon. Shadows messed up in URP only! Tried an empty Built-in pipeline project and without changing much settings (besides Shadow Resolution in Project Settings) the result is miles better compared to URP. Even at Low and Medium shadow resolutions, let alone at High and Very High shadow resolutions which look almost AAA grade.

So what’s the solution, are you sticking with BIRP then? But I read somewhere it is about to be dropped in one of upcoming V6 point updates, not?

BIRP Shadow Resolution = Low

BIRP Shadow Resolution = Medium