   FEAR 2 shadows
  I noticed a weird effect, sorta like screen door transparency, in FEAR 2's shadows. Look at the stool shadow here:Any idea what that might be?   
  My guess is jittered sampling.When they sample the shadow map, they do so using random offsets in an attempt to soften the edges.The other shadow in the screenshot has hard-edges though, so I may be way off...   ;  They're using stencil shadows.   ;  stencil shadows for geometry, followed by some variant of SSAO which gives the wierd shadows on the edges of the geometry   ;  Yeah, that appears to be somee jittering acne with maybe just a touch of PCF to try to smooth it out. (See Also: GTA IV Shadow Jittering)   ;  I think that's more some kind of SSAO effect than shadow map.   ;  can you post a screenshot without the zoom-in? maybe it's ssao with a bug due to the zoom.   ;  Whatever it is it looks awful...   ;  its SSAO "silhouetting".   ;  Stencil shadows huh? I didn't think they were widely used anymore. Looking at that screenshot reminds me why - hard edges look terrible :-(   