Shadow filtering quality, is this a bug?

Unity Engine
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1

Hello, So When i set the shadows filtering quality to high

I get this result

8641068--1162227--upload_2022-12-7_4-32-21.png
8641068--1162227--upload_2022-12-7_4-32-21.png803Ă—759 389 KB

And when i set the filtering quality to low i get this result which i think it looks better

8641068--1162230--upload_2022-12-7_4-32-45.png

Is the first one okay or something is wrong?

2

I think the High is taking into account things like the angular distance of the lights. The bigger the angle, the more blur you are asking for (like on the directional light for the sun). If you want crisp edges, you can achieve that by reducing the angular distance.

Having said that, lower quality almost certainly uses less CPU. So if you can live with it, go for it!

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3

Perfect, Thanks

4

No, the dithered look is because you don’t have TAA on. High quality filtering relies on TAA for denoising, set your camera to use TAA then press play. It’ll look better, and you can control smoothness with each light, unlike medium/low filtering.

Note that scene view AA is different from in-game, you can change your scene camera to use TAA (and refresh mode needs to enabled for it to take effect in scene view), but TAA isn’t that good in scene view, you’re better off just doing SMAA/FXAA for scene view, and TAA for your in-game camera.

Note that high quality filtering has a very large performance impact, especially when using point light shadows.
And that cost isn’t shown in the profiler as shadows, so it might be hard to realize if you don’t know about it, it’s actually added to the deferred lighting cost (in the GPU profiler)

5

Thats what i thought, I’m using TAA in-game camera, I disabled the filtering i don’t think it worth that performance impact

6

Hi, It’s not a bug,

Low, Med, High, Shadow filtering all use Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
This is a method to AA the shadows by averaging surrounding samples and blurring them uniformly

High filtering turns on Percentage Closer Soft Shadow (PCSS)
This is a much higher quality and more physically accurate soft shadow rendering technique that utilises the angular diameter of directional lights, or the radius of the other light types to simulate the falloff and blurring of shadows the further they are away from the object.

Their quality is defined by your HDRP asset and sun quality settings chosen from that.
for quality controls and stepping, each light has a Filter Sample Count, and normal bias control.
for the directional lights, i believe it’s just the normal control to aid with any stepping you might get.
the smoother the more resources mind

You can see more in Pierre’s 2020 unite video on shadows in general.

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