Shadow mapping is a powerful technique for shadow computation, and is rapidly becoming prevalent in next generation games due to the ubiquitousness of high precision pixel shading capabilities in modern graphics hardware. However, shadow mapping algorithms are often plagued by blocky aliasing artifacts and precision based bias issues. This talk describes a variety of shader based methods to improve both the filtering quality and the performance of shadow mapping algorithms in order to alleviate these problems in an efficient manner. A variety of approaches will be compared and contrasted, and a number of small but novel improvements to each algorithm will be discussed.