I'm a huge fan of the depth mapped shadows, but that's a personal thing since I try to use raytracing as infrequently as possible for speed reasons - almost exclusively for refractions, AO and some reflections.

You can use depth mapped shadows on large scenes if (viewing through the light) you can see the entire scene and the resolution is cranked up, greater than 1024 as mentioned. Depth mapped shadows can never be transparent or transmit colors the way raytraced shadows can. 

You can "blurrier" raytrace shadows if you increase the number of samples but prepared to take a hit.