I noticed this in a preview screenshot, was hoping it wouldn't make it into the final game. here are some screenshots:

http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7979/gridshadows2.jpg
http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/4587/gridshadows.jpg

Notice the way the shadows make like a small grid? Its really annoying. I've tried with ultra shadows and various other graphic settings on/off, but nothing gets rid of it. Anyone figured out how to fix this?

bump.

I know what she means I noticed it too, she means on geralts face... the character faces in general....

.... or he

I think the word you are looking for is 'dithering', and I have a feeling it's programmed into the shadows. It's used to reduce the processing power required to render the shadows. I only notice it in the cutscenes so it doesn't really bother me.

Yeah, not the best examples, as both those images show it working pretty well to my eye.

But I have seen the dreaded shadow aliasing cropping up here and there.
It doesn't seem like it affects all shadows, most seem to show proper edge softening, and the occasions where jaggies crop up don't seem that frequent... rare enough for me to have entirely ignored it so far.

Shadow-map shadows are always going to exhibit occasional aliasing... especially in large environments, it's just a very difficult task rendering detailed shadow maps over such huge expanses without destroying frame rates and GPU memory footprints.

May just be something we have to live with. Can't say it's bothered me that much up to now.

Ah, yes I see it now. Never noticed it in-game however, so even if it was there, I forgive it.

For a game that otherwise looks so good, this is a huge annoyance. They really need to fix this, it's very distracting.

It only happens on areas of partial transparency.

It's especially bad with shadows on the ground:

http://i.imgur.com/evYVN.jpg

It actually looks worse than this, but since it gets converted to a jpg it is blurred a bit and looks better than it appears in-game.

It isn't the only way to do these either, so why they picked such a terrible way to do transparency I don't know. The only other game I've seen this bad is Just Cause 2. Pretty much every other game I checked does partial transparency and shadowing much better.

Glad I'm not the only one to see this. I tried fiddling with things, and nothing seems to work. Doesn't bother me that much, but if there is a way to change it...

I'm also experiencing these "grids" in my game. More so on the faces on the shadowed parts. It's not everywhere but I do notice these things and it is a bit bothersome to me. I thought maybe my graphics card is going bad (which I hope it isn't) but at least I know others are experiencing the same thing.

I've tried a whole bunch of settings and nothing's made any difference for this - in the Witcher config, NVidia control panel, etc.

Even on ultra with everything - including the "Ubersampling" option - I still have this.

I have to hope this is a bug they're fixing... why on earth would you even have such high end settings if you're going to ruin all the shadowing like this?

Ah, I see what you mean now. It's not aliasing as I thought (although that does crop up rarely on some shadows in my game) - they're using some kind of dithering to apply them.

I can't say why exactly, but I'd guess it had something to do with prohibitive storage/processing requirements of full 8-bit-depth 4096x4096 shadow maps... or something like that.
I've seen dithering like it in a lot of games... the worst was GTA 4, absolutely hideous.
By comparison, I've found it pretty subtle in TW2 so far. As it's a pixel-aligned pattern, it does naturally become less conspicuous at higher resolutions though... so, I'd recommend getting a monitor with small pixel-pitch, like a Dell 27" 2560x1440 :-P

Just wanted to add my 2 cents.

After messing with various AF settings in Catalyst, different shadow settings within the game, and AA settings, I was unable to really remedy this "dithering" at all.

It seems like some areas suffer much more from it than others, like a particular dock that you visit, for example.

Glad I'm not alone though - this really does look awful, and is incredibly bothersome when it appears on a character's face. Hope they can fix it somehow.

I'm also getting this weird dithering thing as well. ATI card on 11.5

Well, at least I'm not alone in the issue. Hopefully a patch will fix it eventually.

I should send CDPR a support message with my issues thus far.