No Shadows After Upgrade From Unity 4 to Unity 5 (64 bits)

Unity Engine
1

Until about a month algo, I was working with Unity 4 (can’t remember whether it was 4.3 or 4.4 or whatever, but I know for sure it wasn’t 4.6). Everything was fine, it was the free version and I could use hard shadows.

Last month I replaced my old Unity 4 with the fancy new Unity 5 (5.0.1 to be more accurate), 64 bits (my Unity 4 was 32 bits). Now I tried to use shadows… thing is, regardless of what I do, I have no shadows

I tried changing the Quality Settings, the Player Settings, the Lightning Window stuff, the materials, the light, the skinned mesh renderer, the terrain. Yet the result is always the same: no shadows! Even though they used to be fine in Unity 4!

Anyone else has had this issue? Do you know if the newer Unity 5.1 may solve this? Or should I downgrade to Unity 4?

2

Even if I create a brand new scene with just a cube and a plane, I still get no shadows!

My graphics card is eight or nine years old, may that be the issue? However it worked fine with Unity 4! Can I mimick Unity 4 rendering in Unity 5?

The scariest thing is that it seems I am the only one with this issue…

3

With a graphics card that old, that is most likely the issue. Unity 5 completely changes the way lighting is handled.

1 Like
4

So maybe I should downgrade to Unity 4.6?

5

What graphics card do you have?
You could downgrade back to Unity 4.6, but maybe it’s better to consider buying a new graphics card instead?

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6

Wait, I had installed Unity 5.0.1 in another computer (a notebook) and now I tested the shadows there and the issue persists. No shadows either!
This notebook was bought in 2011. Everything else seems to be fine, even though this is one of those tiny slow notebooks.
Both this notebook and that nine year old desktop are using Windows 7.

7

Did you write any custom shaders?

Again, 2011 is a long time ago in hardware terms.

1 Like
8

My graphics card is a Radeon X1600.

9

I’m using Legacy Diffuse. I’ve also tried the new Standard Shader.

10

I don’t think this is an issue with your graphics card, Unity 5’s shadows are done differently but they should be more reliable, post your simple cube test project and I’ll check my end. You maybe doing something wrong, I have had odd bugs with shadows, but less so in Unity 5. Just a quick though check if:

Edit → Graphics Emulation

Is on No emulation, that should help if it’s not.