I need 4 levels of simple subdivs in my simple test case (looking at preview rendering only), taking the scene from 80 to 12320 faces. Not sure what “closed as archived” means, but I hope it’s not a forgotten thing.
Subdivision treats the syptoms, not the cause. The source of the problem is the terminator artifact ray biasing, which can be adjusted or even turned off:
The geometry offset defaults to .1, turn it to zero to negate this artifact.
If you start running into shadow terminator artifacts, then you will need to find a happy medium, but I generally find that I rarely ran into issues with those artifacts. I generally avoid high contrast small light sources and low poly smooth shaded models, but, as always, YMMV.
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Hehe, I wish I had the option to always use huge light sources. Anyhow, this works for me; setting geometry offset to 0 fixed the main issue.
Mostly it was the low poly smooth shaded part. And generally, if you have more than 10 lights in your scene, it’s pretty damn hard to have high enough shadow contrast for the terminator issue to manifest.
My own limitation with geo nodes is also part of the problem, in that I’m not able to have full control over where smoothing is applied. An auto smooth node with all those options would have been nice. Still, I now know where to look if I end up with a similar problem in a real project again.