Revisiting Shadows Methods

hi
shadows are always been an issue when it comes to real-time app, there is no such thing a perfect method for shadows, until now i choose vsm for shadowing, but the more i work with them, the more i get the feeling its great for "demos" not for complex scene where shadow complexity is high , yes i know about the bleeding issues and how to minimize them, but there are scenes where you need to minimize them a lot and at the end you just get simple shadow map, and the softness you applied by blurring or such isn't noticed so much.
because of this i started to investigate few other methods, and i must say i got really good results:
a word about poplar shadowing methods:
1. sm - old school shadow maps
2. pcss - percentage closer soft shadows
3. vsm - variance shadow maps
4. esm - exponential shadow maps
5. cssm - cascaded shadow maps
6. pssm - parallel split shadow maps
as much as it will sound odd, i choose method 1 for indoor shadows, yes, old school shadow maps with poission disk and jittering gives me very good results.
while method 2 sound really good, its not applied very well for every scene, it also not free in terms of performance.
anyway, i created 16 samples of poission disk and generated jitter texture which i passed to the shader. the poission disk can be tuned for more samples or less, the jittering can be tuned for more jitter or less.
because i use two shadow maps, static for static shadows and dynamic for dynamic shadows, i managed to optimize this by using one texture with offsetting.
method 5,6 used for outdoor scenes, i use pssm...
here is few screenshots:

complex shadows from 2 light sources
note that vsm will fail below the platform (light bleeding) and the fence details won't be visible even with 1k shadow maps because the compassion is based on probability and could be failed where simple compassion will pass.

complex surface casting shadows

zoom in on shadows

before you said its not so impressive, note that the 2 light sources using only 8 samples on 1k maps, the barrel is dynamic object which means the dynamic shadow map is updated and merged with static shadow maps, the fence have very tiny elements, and it all runs on my old g6600, so i think its pretty good ;)