Fixing unclean Normal map on round shapes? This is more of a general 3D material question than a Blender issue but there seems to be no Stack Exchange forum for more general 3D design questions so I'm posting this here.

I'm trying to bake a normal map from a high poly model to a low poly model so that the normal map gives the impression of high detail (as used generally for low poly game 3D objects) but I can't figure out how to get it look smooth on round shapes like in my example here ...



This is a simple bucket model. The hi poly model cylinder has 24 sides vertically and looks very smooth in subdivision mode. The low poly model has 12 sides. You can see that the baked round edge doesn't help anything to make the low poly model more detailed. it just looks bad. So I wonder what are some good ways to improve this without increasing the polys on the low poly mesh?
The only way to improve the look here is to increase the low-poly polycount.

The normal map looks ok, but if you will face any problems in the future, you can find a massive amounts of good info here: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_map