I don’t normally have the square bracket landing path on, but sometimes use the taxi pointers. I forgot to switch it off recently, and I noticed that when landing in sunshine, the landing path brackets cast a shadow on the ground. This doesn’t really make a lot of sense!
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Same thing for the taxi ribbons.
Useless use of hardware power imo
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They’re rendered as objects in the “real” world, so they would have the same characteristics - including shadows.
Being ‘virtual’ objects they really shouldn’t be rendered - if they were ‘real’ then you could crash into them.
Note that you can’t crash into airborne objects currently in the sim, so I don’t think that really applies.
I’ve had this conversation before. People will fight to justify those shadows 
It’s like having your checklist cast a shadow 
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No one is trying to justify them. We’re simply trying to explain why they have shadows.
In the end, it’s really a coding decision which could “suppress” shadows. Given the prevalence by which shadows and their variety exist within the sim (Search for “Shadows” - tons of results), a lot of effort has been put into creating lighting effects. Is turning it off for a particular subset of objects possible? What level of effort would it take? Where does that fall in the “backlog” (Agile definition) of Stories? Only the Dev Team can answer that.
If one feels really strongly about it, consider opening a Wishlist item for it and/or submit a question for the next Dev Q&A.
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If the landing path brackets have a real-world parallel, they’re like a sort of HUD. They should not cast shadows: they are not real-world objects.
It strikes me that there is a lot of rendering of invisible objects in msfs.
This is an example of rendering non-existent objects, which takes it to another level.
Perhaps if it worked like a film company doing cgi in a movie, where they don’t render the scenes they won’t be using, the software might be less of a resource hog.
Of course there is a cost to pre-scanning to decide whether an object is going to be visible, but defining the fov before rendering might reduce the rendering task by about 80%.
Perhaps this will end up being part of multi-screen functionality. We can always hope!
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In most game engines you can put objects in layers that don’t cast shadows.
So normally this should be an easy fix.
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