flat rendering near light shadow transition in blender cycles

Hello I have ran into i little problem i am rendering a simple uv sphere with one sun light and the environment black and it comes out like this:



as you can see the transition in the shadow area is render pixalated or flat even though the entire mesh is in smooth shading.
Has anyone come accros this before and might anyone know what causes this.

Hope anyone can help me with this.

Shadow terminator problem. It happens with a low polygonal models which are have “smooth” normals.
Take away either smooth or add polygons.

Exactly. This is known as the terminator artifact. Many unbiased render engines suffer from this and you will find dozens of threads about this in this forum already.

Only way to solve this in Cycles is to use a light source with a “softer” shadow/light transition and/or to massively increase the density of the geometry, e. g. by subdividing it.

Strange that such an issue has not been tackled within most renderers, i guess it must be a really difficult problem, but thanks for the info