I posted the technical reasons for the shadows being like this in a full day/night lighting solution. It will help explain why its like it is for gt5, Also static backed shadows for environments and real time for cars/ vs real time for everything is a huge difference. Arklight is right but my post talks about it in a little more detail. I'm waiting for it to be approved by the mods, then ill post it in here.
Hi all, been reading the forums over the past month and i must say its provided me with a lot of entertainment.
Sorry for my first post being off topic but i thought i might be able to help/address zork123 with his shadow problems. I'm a game developer and i have worked on games for both xbox and ps3. OK so realtime shadows, in the case with GT5 uses a split parallel shadow system, from what i can tell its a 3 split system. What this means is that there are 3 shadow maps at varying quality/resolutions. So the closer you are to the car the higher quality the shadow map, further away it will use a lower shadowmap like a lod system. From what i see its not a bad shadow system, Now i understand the comments that the guys have made, i know these are based on a limited knowledge of what shadow maps are and how much they cost "on any console" Ok now to the part that talks about why the shadows go to a lower quality sooner then some other games. Due to having a day night system they have to cast a shadow from every piece of geometry, now they have to do this while keeping the game running at 60 fps at 1080P. So imagine the game fps is broken down to frame% so 100% is 60fps, now remember how i said that the shadows have to be cast from all the geometry, well this cost as much frame % as the polygons do, so say to draw the polygons it cost 30% of a frame the shadows will cost close to that, and the more polys you draw the slower the game will run so thats almost half a frame gone with just those 2 parts now add physics shaders FX damage ect ect you can see that 100% fills up fast. Running a game at double the frame rate of a normal game is crazy enough, but to run that at 1080p you are again drawing more pixels to the screen increasing that frame% again, my works engine wouldn't even come close to that. And i don't think a lot of engines would. And i can tell you that the xbox wouldn't come close. As far as the artifacts well thats a trade off. the more stuff you do to fix problems like Perspective Aliasing, Projective Aliasing ,"Shadow Acne and Erroneous Self-Shadowing< what you see on some of the cars>" Peter Panning, there are more but you get teh drift. Fixing these all adds cost to the frame% So its one of those things. Make the game run at 30fps, omg you get another 100% of a frame to do high res shadow maps with a greater draw distance and fix some of the other artifacts. We had a lot of trouble running games on the xbox with a good shadowmap system even at 30. And eventually got it running faster on the Ps3 with the help of the psu's. So sorry for the giant post, but posting comments like fix the shadows sometimes isn't as simple as fixing the shadows.And i can tell you that what they have achieved on the ps3 is amazing. it would be amazing on any console.
And i can tell you what they have done in this game would not have run on the xbox not at 1080p. When you develop a game for ps3 only it will always run faster.
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