Last time I tinkered with shadow maps was maybe 10 years ago. Today on this project: tweaking cascade splits and placement, shadow bias and filtering settings. Feels like not much has changed during the decade, besides shadowmap filters being a bit nicer :(
@aras The resolution can be significantly higher, which... in practice reduces fragility and artifacts only a bit. :(
But honestly, I don't think there are any more reasons not to raytrace at least shadows (at least on PC and NVIDIA; I don't know how performance looks like on consoles).
Add ReSTIR DI / PT and you can not only beat the quality by an insane margin, but also have literally every light being a shadow casting light.
@BartWronski @aras For the hard shadows it may be cheap and simple, but soft shadows bring that back into finickyland of Monty Python integration.
@dpwiz @aras TAA + jitter is anyway what many (most? :) ) do even instead of PCF/PCSS (back in my days ESM and flavors did not work other than on specialized cases)