One of the improvements iRacing is most excited about with this upcoming June release, is a significant overhaul of our shadow system. Many more things in the sim now receive shadows and the end result is a much more lifelike environment. Check out the below animations to see the before and after. You’ll be surprised by what you haven’t been seeing all this time.
Shawn Nash wrote:
The difference is nearly all GPU side. The creation of the shadow maps is nearly identical to previous versions (a slightly different surface format is all, it uses a little more GPU memory). But, the shadow maps themselves contain the same shadows in them as before, the change is that more objects are capable of receiving them now. This means that the pixel shaders do a little more work for all of those objects that are receiving them, but not much more.
The extra receiving code on trackside objects is disabled by default on lower performance hardware, and may be manually disabled (for the most part), via an rendererDX11.ini setting (or forced on) if necessary.