I’ve seen this come up multiple times, and experimentation with URP shows that the default shadow distance at 50 provides acceptable-looking shadows, but as the distance approaches 200-1000, they start to become very blurry. Why does increasing max shadow distance reduce quality and is there a way to get the same quality shadows while also increasing the max distance?
Because shadows are rendered to a texture. The texture isn’t infinite so the bigger the range the more the shadows have to be shrunk to fit on that texture. As you can imagine, this means bad quality. You should experiment with cascades until it looks good.
Cascades means you get to dictate where your quality is put, such as the near range, with less quality for far, and something in between, that suits your specific scenario.
2 Likes