Originally posted by The most stupid bird in history:

Ok so I'm not sure how to put it, the game calculates shadows in a different way on PS3 and on PC, on PS3 the alpha channel of a texture is taken into account as shadow calculations are done, on PC, even the transparent part of a texture casts shadows, making every shadow coming from alpha textures a big angular blob

...this also applies on other minor things, such as coconut trees shadows on neo bodhum (look at shadows on the ground and you'll see that every tree shadow that wasn't pre calculated will be all blocky.

Yep, I noticed this yesterday, after firing up the game on PC for th first time. Nobody seems to have an answer or work-around for this. A shame - the beach area with the palm trees could look really nice if only those palm tree shadows didn't look so obviously wrong (I am being serious - I know how they should look from my 360 version of the game, and I'm sure my PC could make them look even better than that).

Originally posted by CalUKGR:

Yep, I noticed this yesterday, after firing up the game on PC for th first time. Nobody seems to have an answer or work-around for this. A shame - the beach area with the palm trees could look really nice if only those palm tree shadows didn't look so obviously wrong (I am being serious - I know how they should look from my 360 version of the game, and I'm sure my PC could make them look even better than that).

The weirdest thing is that in FFXIII and LR:FFXIII, they didn't f**k it up, but all 3 games run on the same engine, so they pulled it off in 13, ruined it in 13-2, and fixed it in LR:13 ? How do you end up doing that when all games where ported one after the other on, AGAIN, the same engine ? ._.

I know this is old topic, but I couldn't find any answers regarding this issue when searching over the internet. Only numerous request for fix, which none was answered.

I couldn't find what is actually causing this?
Is this graphic card drivers issue, where they eventually removed support for some "game specific" shader instructions that calculated correct shadows from texture transparency, or they simply never implemented/purposely removed the instructions for correct shadows rendering, because it was too demanding on hardware back then in 2014?

What seems odd to me is that I couldn't find any mentions of this quite visible graphical issue from around the time of XIII-2 Steam release, only from several years after.
That's why I'm not sure if the game was released like this or certain graphical drivers update later removed support for this.

It wouldn't be first game that used specific instructions for rendering, that was not used anywhere else, thus the support was dropped over time.

Also wonder if anyone still cares about this.
I mean, it's not game breaking. The PC port have much worse issues, but once you resolve those, this graphical issue is making the game experience worse, because it's quite visible on many occasions.

It's not just palm trees on the New Bodhum.
It's every single model that use textures with alpha channel transparency.

Originally posted by Number Eight:

I know this is old topic, but I couldn't find any answers regarding this issue when searching over the internet. Only numerous request for fix, which none was answered.

I couldn't find what is actually causing this?
Is this graphic card drivers issue, where they eventually removed support for some "game specific" shader instructions that calculated correct shadows from texture transparency, or they simply never implemented/purposely removed the instructions for correct shadows rendering, because it was too demanding on hardware back then in 2014?

What seems odd to me is that I couldn't find any mentions of this quite visible graphical issue from around the time of XIII-2 Steam release, only from several years after.
That's why I'm not sure if the game was released like this or certain graphical drivers update later removed support for this.

It wouldn't be first game that used specific instructions for rendering, that was not used anywhere else, thus the support was dropped over time.

Also wonder if anyone still cares about this.
I mean, it's not game breaking. The PC port have much worse issues, but once you resolve those, this graphical issue is making the game experience worse, because it's quite visible on many occasions.

It's not just palm trees on the New Bodhum.
It's every single model that use textures with alpha channel transparency.

Yes it's especially bad on chocobos with their layered feathers texture planes.
As far as I remember, it was fine on PS3, and has been butchered on PC since day one, no fix available unfortunately.

Some other issues are solved by mods, like the incorrect transparancy for rain.
You can check the PCGamingWiki page of the game to get more info :
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XIII-2