I might be late to the party on this one, but I recently found out that I could modify the shadows beyond the settings of the msfs ui. I was getting tired of the jagged shadows that shimmered whenever the plane moved. I modified the below section, changing the size to 8192, and I could not believe the difference it made. Shadow lines are crisp and do not shimmer at all. I do not see a noticeable impact on frames either!
I love messing around with the cfg files (yay 700% LOD), so I’ll give this a go as well
Wondering though; does this affect global shadows, or just the cockpit stuff? I would imagine it being global, which might impact performance more around areas with loads of trees.
That is very possible, but I haven’t noticed a drop for me.
I will admit to not being super technically inclined, so I don’t do tests on memory usage or anything like that while playing. I just note if I see lower frames, or stutters. I have not with this as of yet.
Tested this for a bit. Cockpit textures do look noticably sharper, and I get much less of the jagged edges you normally get when the light is just brushing over curved surfaces.
It’s still present, but to a lesser degree. This was the ‘worst’ I’ve seen it with this edit (can’t call it bad at all);
However; when getting back closer to the ground, with loads of buildings/trees in bright sunlight, the framerate took a bit of a dive (probably combined with my stupid high LOD settings). So I guess it does affect things globally.
I’ll have to give this some more testing time, maybe I’ll end up between the normal maximum and the 8192 you’ve set (so at 4096).
that all depends;
-in direct sunlight the shadows will be sharp. Those extra 2 meters inside the cockpit won’t affect anything relative to the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
-if the light source is more diffuse (let’s say with a very light cloud cover/haze, combined with reflected light from other surfaces), then shadows will be more diffuse as well the further they are from the source of the shadow.
That being said. The shadow setting have a big impact on performance, so I would be careful with this on systems already limited by pushing the GPU performance limit.
True! As a guide, I am running a 3080Ti at 4k native resolution, mainly ultra settings.
I started at 8192, but I have found 6144 to be the best for my system.
(6144 is half way between 4096 and 8192).
Reasons = it just takes the edge off the shadows. As some have said, they can look just a little too sharp and unnatural at 8192. Aslo, adds just that little bit of performance back so I can hit 45 FPS Gsync on a Freesync ultimate monitor (needs to stay above 40 FPS for this to work).
This seems to be a good optimum compromise for anyone running something similar. My old 1080Ti actually ran quite well with shadows at 4096, so that should be alright for nearly everyone.
Hopefully the in game sliders can be adjusted to cover these settings (PC only probably).
