Capsule shadows are a huge step toward a broader photorealism in games. You've probably played a number of games (this is especially true in open-world environ

Capsule shadows are a huge step toward a broader photorealism in games. You've probably played a number of games (this is especially true in open-world environments) where direct sunlight looks amazing: Everything casts shadows realistically, giving the scene a very believable sense of illumination and depth. But walk into the shadows, and all that vanishes: Even if the environment has some approximation of global illumination, no shadows are calculated (since there would be far too many secondary light sources versus the single sun). Screen-space ambient occlusion helps somewhat, but it's a hack that looks good sometimes and weird other times. Capsule shadows, if calculated from the top one or two secondary light sources, can approximate the shadows resulting from that complex network of bouncing light in a much more realistic and believable way.