I think this issue is big enough to take care of it.
I mean, this is what you get right after opening Blender, creating a sphere and rendering it.
I don't even need to tell you about rendering low poly characters. Eww...

I agree with Caetano, it is a real issue with low-poly characters what deserves to be solved.

Same problem... 2017 year

This request actually belongs more to rightclickselect.com. If anyone wants to make a proper request there, give a link here and I'll probably upvote it.

I made it: https://rightclickselect.com/p/rendering/Mtbbbc/fixing-terminator-effect-and-other-rendering-artifacts-in-cycles

Thanks

Note that a better explanation of this issue is described in this paper, look for "Terminator problem"
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7986/ebd7b5427bbe54edb7c0c9cf674fee817933.pdf

The question is then how a workaround could be made from algorithm side, am I right?

I do not understand why you need additional requests on third-party sites? I do not understand why you are convinced that this is "normal"?
It's not a bug? But problem is here, result - not good. 4 years guys. Can you make simply, that render work fine?

Some industry render engines like 3Delight have the terminator artifact too (maybe even Renderman ? I would like to test).

Asking to prevent this artifact is similar to asking bidirectional path tracing (in the sense that it adds a feature). You can call it fixing in the sense that every improvement of the software is fixing a problem, but you can't call it a bug fix in the sense that it's not an unpredicted behavior.
When Brecht wrote the code for the early Cycles version, he certainly knew this would happen. A bug is something you didn't expect when writing your code. Which is why this belongs more to a feature request website than a bug tracker.

The fact that the feature request website is "third party" is a different kettle of fish. Maybe Blender.org could have an "internal" dedicated section for that like Autodesk has with the "little annoying things" but unfortunately the dev team of Blender is 10 times smaller than the one of Autodesk. But also 10 times bigger because it has the rest of the world, which is why they let this website be handled by the others. Note that rightclickselect is very much welcoming help for improvements of its website.
Pros & cons of open source, man !

I'm agreed that this is a feature request. But this is really a vital thing for artists. We cannot render our game models. Could you add more priority to this request, please?

Even houdini fixed it in mantra http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/news/15/rendering#shadow-terminator

@Lukas Stockner (lukasstockner97) Maybe something you would like to work on someday.

I understand that is not a bug with code, but... this is not a "little annoying thing", it's a render problem, how corrupt final result, and render internal have same "effect", not only cycles. And there is no universal method of treatment for him. Sometimes this can not be fixed in any way, and object need remake, sometimes create new. Sorry for my english. It's a problem guys. I work with 3d max, but after Blender, don't want return, Blender is more flexible, and has great potential.
Can you fix this problem, please?

I just tested with Renderman and well...

http://i.imgur.com/9YrOYBG.jpg

If freakin' RENDERMAN didn't fix this, it's probably a hard problem.

Renderman is a studio rendering engine. It;s created not for indie artists. And Pixar does not render game models for Artstation. )
I'm pretty sure Vray has no such an issue.

In Mental ray it is solved, in Vray it is there, but less problematic (but I haven't tested it with the latest Vray).

Conversation on Corona forum: https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php?topic=10392.0

Some work has been done in this direction, see D2574, although that addresses only part of the problem.

Brecht, it is great to hear. I just made some short tests, but even reducing the 'darkness' of the effect would be a great step forward.

Would you please take a look on this, too?
Currently I'm fighting with this problem related to Cycles and I made comparisons with Vray: https://developer.blender.org/T51548

Thanks