The Quicksilver hardware renderer supports most of the shadow controls associated with light objects, but always generates shadow-mapped shadows.
These shadows are adaptive, and adjust to the scale of the scene: They never show the jagged edges that can appear on scanline-rendered shadow-mapped shadows if you choose an inappropriate shadow map size.
For area lights, the Quicksilver renderer can generate soft-edged shadows.
The Quicksilver renderer doesn't support patterns in shadows (Shadow Parameters 
Map).