Shadows track/PS3 related?

Hi everybody,

I have seen alot of topics about the jaggy shadows though I didn't see a topic that states it is track or PS3 related.
I have found that the shadows are great everywhere at everytime on the track Tsukuba on my PS3,
but I haven't found any other tracks till now that have great looking shadows.
To me this is proof that PD CAN make the shadows look great, but for some reason they only succeded to do it on Tsukuba.

With this topic I want to start a "Collection" of tracks that are confirmed to have great shadows on multiple PS3s.
I want to collect all the tracks in the start post so if you find a track post it here with a picture showing the nice shadows.
I will then see if it has good shadows on my PS3.
Please try it on your playstation aswell and post your findings here.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who would like to see this fixed and I hope this list can help PD to debug their shadow system
and hopefully fix it for all tracks. But I'll need support from GTP to achieve this.

I would love to post a picture with the nice shadows on Tsukuba but I don't have a camera with a high enough resolution and I can't capture the screen.
And a picture in picturemode has great shadows on all the tracks so it is not accurate.

I would like to see this topic as a sticky so more people can confirm this. Thanks for everybody's cooperation.

Trackname (number of confirmations)

Good tracks:

Tsukuba (2)

I have also noticed this plus when you wheel spin the car gets engulfed in smoke but the car goes blurry almost licensees to the point of notice.

I think they were supposed to have fixed the smoke masking problem in the last update.

The shadow quality varies depending on how many cars are on your track. For time trials and practise runs, they're razor sharp. I can't confirm if you start a proper race and then leave them behind if the shadows get any better.

I've done B-spec races (9h Tsukuba) and most of the cars where premium and still the shadows where great. They still are a bit jaggy, but compared to the shadows on other tracks I've tried they are MUCH better.
The smoke thing on the other hand seems completly unrelated and it hasn't been fixed in the update.

Thanks for the input. I set the number of confirmations to "2" judged on your comment Smiggi1991.

Anyone have something to add to this issue?

Well the reason that they have the shadow problems is due to frame rates. The game due to it's car and track rendering uses up a lot of the ps3s hardware. So to
Compensate without a loss of fps polophony use the aliased shadows. Its unfortunate but it's bad textured cars or bad shadows.

TheFlyingKiwi

Well the reason that they have the shadow problems is due to frame rates. The game due to it's car and track rendering uses up a lot of the ps3s hardware. So to
Compensate without a loss of fps polophony use the aliased shadows. Its unfortunate but it's bad textured cars or bad shadows.

Click to expand...

Except it does have frequent losses of FPS, it does have aliased shadows, there are terrible issues with self-shadowing... plus, you get bad textures AND bad shadows... they're not mutually exclusive.

The shadow map resolution is horrendously low, and I have no doubt that it is because they cannot afford higher resolution shadow maps, due to the PS3's restricted memory architecture. If they had more video memory, they could quadruple the resolution of the shadow maps, which would tighten up the shadow detail.

If you watch inside the cockpits, you can also see they use different geometry for generating the shadows, watch the steering wheel shadows,

Sorry for not checking this topic. Had a bussy time.

I know that it is done to avoid problems with fps, however that still doesn't explain why shadows look good on tsukuba and not on any other track. There is no problem with fps on tsukuba so it should be possible on other tracks aswell.

@Lee: I am indeed talking about the selfcasting shadows, because the other shadows that look more like shades are always great. The shadows you can see on the steeringwheel very well are nice. Just the once that are cast from tree's the car itself and the roofsupports (cockpit view) and such look bad on all tracks except tsukuba.