Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox has asked PC gamers to wait 15 minutes for shaders to compile in the background while playing after some said this week’s update had caused increased stuttering.
Here’s a dumb tech question: This happens for so many games, shaders compiling holding up the process. But after an initial compile, it seems like this is written to a file and doesn’t happen on every boot. So can they not simply include pre-compiled shaders?
They run differently based on the hardware you have. They can and might precompile for consoles, but there’s no way for them to know what everyone’s different pc set up is until it’s installed.
Fun fact: Steam (at least on Linux) shares caches between users with the same hardware.
Easier to happen on the Deck since it’s the same hardware for all, but even on my desktop PC I’ve seen it downloading and uploading shaders often.
Here’s a dumb tech question: This happens for so many games, shaders compiling holding up the process. But after an initial compile, it seems like this is written to a file and doesn’t happen on every boot. So can they not simply include pre-compiled shaders?
They run differently based on the hardware you have. They can and might precompile for consoles, but there’s no way for them to know what everyone’s different pc set up is until it’s installed.
Fun fact: Steam (at least on Linux) shares caches between users with the same hardware.
Easier to happen on the Deck since it’s the same hardware for all, but even on my desktop PC I’ve seen it downloading and uploading shaders often.
I think Valve or others have proposed creating a standard for this for just this purpose.
Isn’t fossilize exactly that? A serialisation format for shaders.
That might be the one I was thinking of. It rings a bell.
That makes sense, thank you.