Fromsoftware, wich released Elden Ring with heavy shader compilation stutters, released Armored Core 6 in 2023, with zero compilation stutter. They solved the issue in their engine and, probably, won't see them again in their games.
There's no need for a button. It should simply automatically pre-compile the shaders straight after installation, when the game boot's up for the first time. That first boot will take a lot longer, but who gives a damn if it gets rid of most of the stutters.
One thing to note is that while precompiled shaders on consoles are great, they also make backwards compatibility more challenging - even when the same hardware architecture is reused between generations. The APUs in the PS5 and Series S/X had to be custom designed specifically for compatibility with Gen8 shaders and thoroughly tested, which added to R&D time/costs. Backwards compatibility is something PC gamers can just take for granted precisely because of the games not having precompiled shaders. Ultimately everything is about trade-offs.
This is actually a hot take no one seems to think about lol. In the future consoles my NOT have precompiled shaders and the process might get to another instance like during the instalation or something
But even then, there's no technical reason why console games couldn't do the precompiled shaders on first launch on newer hardware. But there's more to it than that, especially on PS consoles, being that they let developers go deep on low level access, which makes it much harder to have backwards compatibility. Personally, I perfer the approach on the PC with Vulkan, which gives most of the benefits of lower level access to the hardware whiles having backwards compatibility. As for shaders, I'm amazed it's still a issue when there are a few solutions around it, either by compiling the shaders on first load, or doing them ahead of time for the region you are in, yes it would use a little more cpu powers, but it's better that that stutter, and being as it only needs to do the shaders for the nearby region, it would use far less cpu power than doing it all, either way, thats got to be better than doing shaders on command which always does shader stutters.
@@marioslrzn Questionable opinion aside, there is no current console with backwards compatibility beyond PS4 on PS5 (and perhaps Xbone on XSeX). Everything else are either ports or specific emulators.
@@RippahRooJizah The Series X is backwards compatible beyond the Xbox One, but all of those Gen 6/7 titles had their shaders recompiled for the Xbox One'x x86 hardware and so the files are very different from what shipped on the original discs (hence a mandatory download).
Just guessing really, but I think it's because the complexity of the shader process has increased as the visual fidelity of the games has improved, so there's much more information for the GPU to interpret.
I think a mix of two factors. 1. The number of shader variants used in a typical title has increased dramatically as computers have gotten faster and we've pushed for more impressive visuals. 2. The increasing popularity of off the shelf game-engines that use "compile the shader the first time it's drawn" as a naive fallback behavior. For 2, you wouldn't think the default would matter that much given the amount of work that goes into a game. There's nothing stopping you from adding an up-front shader compilation step when the game installs, or when it's started for the first time. However, there are a couple of reasons why this doesn't always happen. One is that modern games are often developed for console first where this isn't an issue, and then ported to PC. Another is that when games are being developed, tested, and QA'd, the cached compiled shaders don't get wiped often (if at all) so by the time you're at the polish stage of trying to clean up random stutters and drops, the game has likely been run hundreds of times on a given dev/test machine and the issue is no longer visible. You have to go out of your way to test on clean machines in order to see it, so unless a studio is aware of the issue specifically and takes special care, it's very easy for it just not to show up in the issue tracker.
I'd gladly pre-compile my shaders if given the option, even if it adds under one hour of installation time. If that'd go for hours I'd still accept a partial shader cache pre-compilation if it means less stutter on first playthrough.
There are some games that precompile shaders on first launch (or when you update graphic driver) and while it's annoying to sit and wait for a few minutes for the process to occur, its far less annoying then throwing up on your keyboard because of stutter. I wish more game developers would pre-compile on launch.
Well, Fromsoftware fixed them in their newer release, Armored Core 6, wich probably uses the same engine as Elden Ring. Elden Ring had serious shader compilation stutters and, AFAIK, still has them to this very day.
He meant 2024. But yeah, with 3 players in the GPU market now (AMD, Nvidia, and Intel), things will only get more complicated, more GPUs to support. And instead of compiling them ONCE, after install, they now compile "when needed". Which is just BS. Yeah, it cuts down on the install time. But at what cost? It absolutely ruins game immersion.
At the end of the day, the PC's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness and coming across experienced programmers who actually understand optimization and know how to do it across the major Engines like Unity, Unreal 4, Unreal 5, Godot, etc, is very hard. They're a rare species.
From my rough understanding, up to DirectX 11, Microsoft defined things like the shader format card manufacturers had to support in order to be DirectX 11 compliant. But Microsoft changed their approach with DirectX 12 so GPUs will use shaders compiled in their own native format which would best suit the hardware. The problem with this approach is that there's no way to pre-compile shaders for games because shader formats can change, not only between different GPU manufacturers, but even between GPU generations and driver versions. So you basically have to compile the shaders on the target hardware at runtime, which you didn't have to do with previous DirectX versions.
Half right. Both DX11 and DX12 require that shaders be precompiled to an intermediate representation (IR) that is shipped with the game (DXBC for DX11, DXIR for DX12), and that drivers take that IR and translate it to native machine code for the specific GPU used by the system. The difference between DX11 and DX12 is that under DX11 the driver was responsible for scheduling this translation, whereas under DX12 it's the developer that is responsible. Under DX11 the developer basically takes the IR and bundles it into a shader object, then links the shader object to the DirectX state which tells the driver that specific shader object should be used for following draw calls or compute dispatches. Knowing what shader to use, DX11 is able to deal with the translation however it needs to, whether by translating in place or reusing a cached translation, whenever it wants to within the frame, whether at the start of the frame or immediately before the shader is needed. Under DX12 the developer takes the IR and bundles it into a pipeline state object (PSO) description, then gives that description with the bundled IR and a whole slew of other state to DX12, where DX12 immediately builds the PSO and performs the IR translation in place, giving a handle representing the PSO back to the developer. When it comes time to issuing the draw calls or compute dispatches, the developer then takes that handle and gives it back to DX12, where DX12 then links it to the DirectX state which tells the driver that specific PSO should be used for those draw calls or compute dispatches (massive simplification, but it's easier to explain this way). And therein lies the problem. The onus of deciding how and when to deal with building the PSO (and by extension translating the IR) falls on the developer under DX12, rather than the driver as is the case under DX11. If the developer wants to build ahead of time, they need to explicitly schedule that build to happen earlier in the frame or even multiple frames before the PSO is actually used. If the developer wants to reuse a cached PSO rather than build a new one, they need to explicitly specify the cache that is used.
I feel like the initial shader compilation can be done "silently" during install, and then with some cooperation from AMD and Nvidia and Intel, when a driver is updated, the user could allow background shader compilation in the background for select or all games, make it configurable. So that way as soon as a new driver is installed, the task happens in the background. I'd imagine consoles have something like this as the drivers have to be updated time to time right? Like it may not tell you it is doing that, but when a system update or game uodate installs I would assume in the background the driver is updated and shaders for the games are recompiled silently?
Maybe a better question is why games/drivers don't pre-compile shaders (like is done on e.g the steam deck via dxvk) more often instead of deferring it to happen during gameplay.
@@ProTroy_ That's not what he's saying. You can pre-compile before playing the game, but after installation. There's no need to do it for dozens of GPUs, just the one in the system. That can of course mean that the shader cache takes up a lot of space on a users computer, or it may be difficult with shaders that are dynamic.
@@SilverEye91 Yeah that's what I meant. It happens if you use Steam on linux as well, it's not exlusive to the steam deck (or even steam for that matter). It takes up some space but not sure if that's really a worry seeing how much space these games take up anyhow and presumably they will cache stuff once it's compiled later anyhow. It does mean some added time on first launch but I think it's preferable to have to wait a bit even if it's like up to like 5-10 minutes on first launch with a clear progress indication rather than having random stutters going through half the game (Or at least give you the option). (In case of the deck they may have some pre-compiled shader downloads which might speed it up as well I'm not sure)
I just don't understand why shader compilation in UE is done synchronously (blocking). I think I would always prefer to just not see an effect for a couple of frames over stuttering. In my naive thoughts I would have something like a separate shader compilation thread that does the work, while the rendering thread would only use shaders that are already compiled.
I was gonna be like "they probably would find that unacceptable", then i remembered tons of games uses texture streaming with very obvious pop in on lower end machines. If they're fine with that, i feel like they could be okay with async.
It is an option in.. 5.2 I think? You can flag objects to be invisible until their shaders are compiled. Not great for cinematics and new effects that should be showing up pretty much full screen, (or even new enemies being invisible for a bit!) so you still need to solve precompilation, but it can reduce how much you need to do.
In a multiplayer game, that’s unacceptable. Imagine dying because the shadows on some grass didn’t render in and hide you from an enemy because they just installed the game.
The one advantage of living in South Africa is I can hire a native off the street to play through my Unreal powered games to do the shader Compilations first for like 10 bucks then I can play it afterwards without the problems.
to me this is just a sign of a lack of polish during the development cycle. Lets be real. Most games these days will be programmed with consoles in mind, therefore not needing any checks for a found shader in the cache. If you hastily port that to PC tho you will encounter the JIT fallback, which is terrible. It could be so easy these days. whenever loading a save during loading screen check for all shaders in the upcoming scene and compile them, on linear games you could do triggerboxes that issue a compilation of stuff ahead and on more open games you can do the last approach but use a background thread to compile a list of "player COULD encounter this object" list. It shouldnt be wizardry and full compiles upon game launch arent the solution either. There are so many way of combating this, most of us have 8 cores available and its purely a lack of polish because "time = money" apparently
I think devs should just add a "compile shaders" option to the main menu of their games. Forcing precompilation is not popular, particularly among low spec and less stutter sensitive players. Yet it is also not acceptable to never have the option of preventing stutter on a high end machine.
Some games just do it in the stat up menu, games like Elden ring and Statfield just doing it in the menu. You can still play, or you can wait until all shaders are compiled.
I never thought about shader compilation as an case-by-case thing. If one PC does it differently than another, it 100% makes sense that problems *must* arise, otherwise you would just, as on console, precompile it and bake it in. All sorts of things can go wrong on a custom machine, it's just disheartening that it goes wrong in at such high percentage rates.
WHat was mentioned in the end, regarding Apple silicone. I want to believe Apple is aiming to improve their performance by virtue of their low number of overall possible configurations.
As far as I understand this might not fix everything, but every game should at least have an optional shader precompilation feature. It's such a simple feature but can greatly benefit a lot of games
Shaders are basically small programs that run on your GPU to perform a certain task. For instance, if a game wanted to draw a box on the screen then there'd be at least two shaders required for that: a vertex shader and a fragment shader. The vertex shader is responsible for taking each vertex from the model of the box and figuring out where on screen that vertex would be given the position, rotation and scale of the box. The fragment shader is responsible for taking a bunch of data from the vertex shader and certain hardware stages to figure out what colour each pixel covered by the box should be. Because the program has to run on your GPU the shader has to be compiled to your GPU's native machine code, so any change in hardware causes a recompile since the GPU's native machine code may have changed with the addition of a new GPU.
i don't understand the shader compilation issue you fsced on Mac. I have RE Village and have played it all the way through on an M1 Max and never experienced this at all. Maybe they shipped precompiled shaders for some models and not others?
That was how it was done back in the old days (before UT4). Nowdays its done "on fly", and both SSDs and CPUs cant keep it up as shaders become more complex and bigger.
A few games I have by default will compile shaders on first start-up (for initial run, new hardware or updated drivers) instead of JITing them. It does mean that occasionally it takes a bit longer to load up the game, but I think that's a worthy tradeoff
Simple. The complexities are obviously too high if many artists tend to draw the same picture. but if you deploy just 1 of them to do the same thing and expect just that, it is really simple as you know what to expect and how to expect.
The sidestep is loading every shader/shader permutation in a given level on some surface visible to the camera (and also vfx, and any asset that's likely to cause stutter on load/spawn) during that level's loading screen. The loading screen would essentially be a plane right in front of the camera that doesn't participate in occlusion culling. At least that's how the teams I've worked on have solved it, when they went through the trouble to solve it. You have to have at least one person on the team who's sensitive to shader compilation stutter, they have to see it happening and report it (assuming they will be believed or hold a position to make calls about such things), and you need folks who know this fix, and the time to implement it has to be available, and even if all that lines up, the bean counters have to approve spending that money on dev time instead of a thousand other things that need doing/fixing. Optimization is not as high on the priority list as I think it should be most times, but then most of the world is set up in ways that don't make sense to me, so maybe I'm the problem haha. There are a lot of moving parts, and most people (myself included) aren't particularly sensitive to shader compilation stutter outside of large stutters of 0.5 seconds+. DF and the folks who consume DF content are far from a majority of people who play these games.
How long would it take to compile all shaders for a game I wonder? When starting a game from scratch, not from a save file, there are surely shaders that aren't needed till later in the game. So why not effectively buffer at the start until it's compiled enough to be stutter free. If you get a new driver, which you say requires recompilation, then buffer according to location in the game. Then in a separate low priority thread have it compile the rest. Alternate to that have a button in the graphics menu for the game that compilers all shaders and then you just wait till it's done. I admit I haven't gamed on PC for quite a while, probably not since the WoW cataclysm expansion, so I'm probably being extremely naïve.
Assuming you meant 2024, what makes you think they’ll improve? We’ve had shader compilation stutter in PC games for well over a decade. Is there some magical fix in the 2024 pipeline?
really? a decade? I can't remember a single game where it happened prior to 2020. it seems to be specifically a recent Unreal Engine 4 and 5 console port problem.
Don't bullshit me. DX12 launched in 2015, and became widespread several years later. There weren't shader compilation stutters on previous APIs because they didn't need to compile during gameplay. If you had stutters on OpenGL or DX11 (and previous) games is caused by something else. Prolly an underspec machine.
@@arsenii_yavorskyi It's a modern API problem. Even non UE4 games had them, most notably Elden Ring. To solve you need to program a tool in your game that precompile shaders at launch, before gameplay. This tool, basically, renders every shader and compiles it. Of course, creating such a tool is a very time consuming job, and not every dev team makes it in time for the publisher deadline.
The magical fix would be to implement asynchronous shader compilation into UE5. It's better to simply not show something until the shader has been compiled in the background than to block the whole rendering thread for a couple of frames.
Games continue to have stuttering problems because most people don't know when the problem is in the game or because they lack a good PC, and companies take advantage of this. And when I see Dead Space Remake with great reviews on Steam I know that the problem isn't going to end anytime soon.
If that was your reason its pretty dumb to be honest. The only reason to own a console is if you just wanna plug and play or your friends play on console.
it's the perfect reason. Paying so much money for hassle isn't something most can tolerate, particularly as you get older. PC gaming is very easy to grow out of.
i remember when i wondered why emulators can't just force compile all shaders at first boot of the game the closest to the answer i got was someone on i think cemu forum saying something that went "because it is impossible to compile shaders before they're needed, as they don't exist before they're called" sufficient to say, i never visited this forum since
nope. there are no game versions made specifically for Steam Deck (most of the time, anyway). it runs either the regular Linux versions, or Windows versions through Proton compatibility layer, which is what actually fixes a lot of the problems.
What I'm wondering is why wasn't this an issue up until a few years ago? At this point I'm not sure exactly when it started to become common, but it can't be more than 2-3 years. I'd never heard of shader compilation stutters before.
Shaders got a lot more complex with DX12 and UE4. Shader compilation was always a thing but in previous generations they were far less complex and so people wouldn't notice.
Forza Horizon just compile it's shaders on first launch, why doesn't other developers follows the same approach? It gives you a smooth butter experience from first iteration till the last minute playing the game. Why doesn't we have it on OTHER GAMES? WHY?
Doesn't valves steam platform provide a preshader step where compiled shaders are downloaded once they are compiled (by other players) to your computer? You never mention this but in theory, it should have a big impact. Or not?
Does Elden Ring still stutter on PC like it did for months post-launch? Already beat it on PS5, but thinking about playing again on PC with my 5800X/3080 system.
I've heard this explanation many times, but I watched this hoping for more. Specifically, why doesn't the game compile the shaders during the initial install, then check your hardware/drivers each time the game boots, and re-compiles during boot up as necessary. This seems like a really obvious solution. So, I assume there's a reason developers don't do this. But I've never seen/read an explanation for why.
I think its because not all shaders can be compiled through that method. A good majority of them can but stuff like particles interacting with other particles and random elements still need to be generated on the fly. At best it can reduce stutter but not eliminate it entirely.
@SpudCommando I'm not convinced that is correct, since your reasoning should also apply to consols. Also, most PC games cache the compiled shaders. That's why micro-stutters are most prevalent during the first playthrough (DF even mentions this in passing in their video).
There's no reason not to do that. Maybe UE doesn't properly support it. I don't know. But at least Forza on PC works exactly like that. After every hardware change or game update, the shaders are compiled at startup.
@@mechanicalmonk2020I don't see the problem with that. Many games start up with either a splash screen or a loading screen, during which the developer is free to do whatever, like compiling shaders
Make the shader compilation be part of the game download sequence! Or just have a pop up that asks, compile shaders before starring? It's not that hard
DirectStorage should also help, but it needs to actually be implemented in more games since it's not just a universal fix. Nvidia also has RTX IO, which has yet to be implemented in games. Both of these together should eliminate most of the issues, but it's going to be years until there's a wide adoption rate for either. Also, try not patting yourselves on the back for games that ended up having a compilation option added. PC gamers have been complaining about this issue FOR YEARS.
Another reason I don't miss PC gaming. And this wasn't an issue. But I do hope to afford a decent gaming PC one day. Not in a rush. Don't have enough time for it anyway.
While this is the real reason, it's not an excuse. Game Devs have long developed methods to precompile shaders before the level loads on PC by simply simulating a camera flying through the level and hiding the entire process behind a loading screen. I'm not sure why this isn't sufficient today.
Stutters are something PC gamers will never get rid of. All this talk about gaming CPUs with 3D cache or G-Sync/FreeSync. Nothing can stop a game from being a smooth 100fps and randomly dropping to 40 and going back to 100fps all within a fraction of a second. For the average person sitting down, they wont care. For the gamer who spend $1200 or $1500 on his PC it will bother the heck out of them, and will spend countless hours wondering which computer part is causing that. or is it just the game? yes. it is the game...
VRR doesn't help in this case, it just allows you to use the headroom you otherwise would need to create (by either lowering graphics settings or target frame rate) to avoid dropped frames. So if for example most parts of a game would run at 90 fps, but some particularly heavy scenes only at 50 fps, you would need to limit the game to 30 fps (on a non-VRR fixed rate display) to get a stable frame rate, or use very aggressive dynamic resolution (which for some reason almost never works properly on the PC and only helps in GPU limited scenarios).
In short a PC is a Personal Computer that has graphics cards to run games. Consoles are gaming machines dedicated to playing software built from the ground up. Sincerely,
@@RyzenZegendexcept consoles have pc components in them now, pretty sure ps5/Xbox are ryzen, switch is Nvidia tegra, steam deck is amd as well this is an issue that can be fixed
If a driver update requires new shaders isn't that the case for some console updates too? What happens if they don't get updated on consoles after major OS updates?
I believe console games include the video driver. If you watch Dave Cutler's interview at Dave's Garage channel, he mentions that Xbox games are virtual machines that include a whole OS. Presumably, this means they also include a driver. Should be similar thing for Switch/PS games.
overall consoles are just easier. I have a decent gaming PC and still prefer playing most stuff on the PS5 because it's just easier. No goofy window drivers to come along and be broken by windows updates. MS abandoned windows quality, they test and have more eyes on the gaming lite version of windows in an xbox anymore than they do with vanilla windows
They do get it sometimes, but I’ve only seen it in one game this generation that I can remember and that is RedFall. Though, I don’t know if it’s shader compilation stutter, or some sort of streaming hitch. But it doesn’t happen all of the time. It seems to happen right as you walk out of the police station and down the steps to the dried out lake area. There’s a hitch that seems to happen every time you hit that spot. Other than that, I don’t remember it anywhere else in the game. I’ll have to play and see. I was one of the few who enjoyed and enjoy the game still. they’ve made it better overtime with patches and it’s fun. It’s good old school fun in a way we don’t get very often anymore. Is it? Of course not. Not many games are these days. Even AAA seem to all have their issues. But it does when it sets out to do and that is entertain me. I’m OK with that.
When there's an option for developers to compile shaders ahead of time for shipping the console versions, why isn't it common practice for PC games compile all shaders to populate a cache when the game launches? Some games do this, but most don't, and this seems silly.
its weird for me that this shader struggle doesnt seem to be this pronounced with Vulkan, maybe its an actual dx12 issue and Microsoft has to change that
I think that's more connected to which games are using Vulkan. It's mostly productions from experienced studios who use their own in-house engines, so it's more likely they understand such issues and can avoid / mitigate them properly. It's mostly the "we just click the build button in UE, it'll be fine" studios whose games suffer from stutter struggle.
@@FOREST10PL This is the same for DX12. Vulkan has an extension that loosens this restriction but the extension has shoddy hardware support at best so no games are using it yet. For the most part anything that Vulkan offers to help with this, DX12 also offers.
Simple, for the same reason the Steam Deck doesn't, because of being a fixed hardware platform, the shaders are complied ahead of time, that something consoles can do and also the Steam Deck can do, it's actually possible to do the same on any PC but it's messy and not ideal. In an ideal world, all games would do the shader compilation ahead of time as you play, being as it only needs to do ahead of time of the region you are in on the game, the resources needed would be quite small and it would be far better than doing as needed, as that creates stutter.
Here's what still confuses me about this issue: If console games require shaders to be known at build time (to be compiled at build time), doesn't this mean that a PC version could use this list of shaders to compile them at runtime?
@@mondodimotori A game only ever needs to compile shaders for the GPU in the current system, and since the list of required shaders is known in advance, this can be a step when launching or loading the game. Or even as a post-install step. And there are entities with the resources to actually do this. nVidia maintains a big cluster for all the performance profiling they use for GeForce Experience profiles, and that's the perfect resources (and delivery system) with which to precompile shaders per-gpu per-driver. It's not like every single different GPU and driver version would require shaders to be recompiled either. GPUs from the same generations shouldn't need different shaders, and not every driver revision is going to invalidate the shaders.
That's one thing I still don't understand. There are some games that do shader-precompilation, but still miss a couple of shaders, so either such a list doesn't exist, or isn't easily accessible. Also UE to my knowledge does support shader creation at run-time, in which case the shader can't be known when doing the build.
@@guspaz Games uses thousands, if not more, of shaders. Some of them are baked into the engine and are unknown to the developers. it still requires time to pre compile all the shaders in house, if it could even be possible, since shaders on current API are compiled at a closer level to the hardware, meaning not even a same GPU could behave the exact same. It's not at driver level, where everything is predictable. You are forced to compile them on the target machine. And several games do exactly that. COD has been doing it since 2019 at least.
Pre complied shader through digital content delivery platform based on hardware would be ideal. However knowing publisher they would probably turn it into some form of DRM (i.e. oh sorry you purchased this game for gtx graphics so it won't work on rtx cards)
That's why I keep consoles around~ , even though I already have gaming PC, sometimes PC can just randomly crash, or has random issues then I have to troubleshoot again before playing game. PC all around machine meaning many things can go wrong too~ while Console strictly "Gaming device", that's what I like about it~ since personally i don't like same device for work and game together. After owning Rog Ally, I spend less time on PC now, gaming on everywhere is nicer even when I taking care my kid.
I have zero stutter on 6900xt and 64gb ram 12700k0 and the game is installed on a separate gen 4 m2 drive . Zero stutter 4k ultra with reshade 45 to 70 fps with rtao . I dont know what this stutter argument comes from ??
Even Starfield pre-compiles shaders, lol. I think ignorance among PC gamers will keep this problem going forever. The publishers don't seem to care about PC ports and many gamers either don't notice or just handwave this stuff saying "it only happens once", even though it generally happens constantly and at the worst times and is probably the most immersion breaking issue, bar the game completely crashing. Personally, I think it's 100% unacceptable for a game to be stuttering all the way through while playing it. I can't believe after decades of PC games evolving, we're literally at a point where the gaming experience is just worse than it ever was and this is fine for a lot of people. I have different PCs for different eras of gaming for compatibility and modern gaming is probably the worst overall experience if you encounter a game that doesn't pre-compile shaders.
Technically PC games on Linux doesn't have compilation stutter on Steam games. Valve implement a mechanism where a person share his high level shaders to the cloud and then you download it and precompile it using fossilize. Thats why elden ring was supperior on Linux on the release date.
Didn't the Steam Deck (of all things) kind of solve this? Again, yes. One set of hardware, but it recompiles with every new driver or Proton update. And then gets downloaded like an update: tada: Shaders done.
Could devs utilize the cloud to allow auto-downloading shaders from other users with similar hardware that played? Similar to RyuSAK for Ryujinx Switch emulation.
you have destroyed UE5 games as an option for myself. So wanted to like Jedi Survivor but the stutters killed that and it should impact the review scores on PC.
I totally understand you. I bought Remnant 2 (which uses UE5) and it’s totally unplayable. Plagued with stuttering, even on lowest setting. Worst thing is that often you end up going above the two hours Steam limit just testing the game and troubleshooting the stutter problem, so goodbye refund
So many excuses. We used to have hour long installations from discs. I am sure people with SSDs can stomach the game running a shader compilation pre-gameplay for a few minutes in order to not have lag spikes. Give me at least a option to pre-compile shaders to have a smoother game experience. This is as in-excusable as not having a FOV slider. And dont give me the storage space bs, with games taking up hundreds of gigabyte its not like devs care anymore to keep installs small anyways so what would abit more installation size to avoid lag during gameplay really hurt?
I dunno man it’s weird, I just don’t use my 1080ti anymore. Series x has been beyond what I expected. Yes maybe if my pc was faster I would be more willing to deal with all the troubleshooting to get things to run “perfectly”…but dang the Xbox experience is good nowadays.
Oh no....DF is saying exactly what John Carmack said over 10 years ago about console gaming vs PC gaming and "coding to the metal." The greatest strength of PC is also its greatest weakness, the diversity of hardware while allowing PC to reach levels of performance not possible on fixed hardware requires alot more development time and resources than console. This is perhaps the greatest reason that console exclusives are so important.....its the only way a developer can ensure that the they can create a somewhat uniform experience across an entire platform. Pc hardware is not uniform and thus not always possible to get a consistent level of performance across the spectrum of PC hardware. Because consoles are fixed hardware, they can have games made specifically for that hardware and if done correctly you will always get the best experience possible given power of that hardware.
Shader compilation/loading can get especially harsh on emulators such as RPCS3. For example: Gran Turismo 5 has stacked up almost 100k shaders and the first shader loading pipeline takes forever to load! We're talking at least 20 minutes. All game launches after that are pretty quick, but shutting down or restarting your PC means doing the long shader load again.
No, you absolutely still do. It just replaces cubemaps, reflection probes, that sort of thing, but the materials would still be PBR. Texture sampling would still need to be done, and various "effects" applied (either screen-space or particles). Shaders are also used for UI elements, text, terrain generation/tessellation, crunching various numbers (e.g. bounding volume hierarchies), dealing with transition textures (from one frame to another), etc. Same with ray tracing. Path tracing is just ray tracing on steroids.
Of course you do. How do you think the color of each pixel is computed when using PT? With shaders. PT (and ray tracing in general) just gives those shaders much more information about the scene, so they can work in world space and not just screen space.
Path tracing needs the same amount, if not _more_ depending on how complex the pipeline is. Raytracing pipelines in DX12 and Vulkan require 2-3 shaders at minimum and can potentially have _dozens_ for handling hits, misses, hits and misses from different geometry groups, custom intersections, etc.
This has been my experience with PC just built a 13700k 4080 combo cost me almost 4k (yes I spent over 300$ in Lian Li fans) but majority of my games stutter there are some games that are just really well made Red Dead 2 is flawless, and Doom Eternal come to mind also stutter free, but been playing Space Marines 2 and PVP is stutter fest.
This is one of the big reasons why I still play games on my Xbox Series X even though i have a gaming laptop. Performance will always deliver no matter the game.
To begin with, a gaming laptop should not be a device used for heavy gaming. That thin build is not going to be able to handle as much heat as a bulkier Series X or full-blown Rig
@roguespartan2854 I mean these newer gaming laptops are pretty beastly and can even play video games at 4K 60FPS with ease if you are willing to spend the money. The one I got I spent $1500 with these specs: - Intel Core i9 13900HX (32 CPUs) 2.2GHz - 32 GB System RAM - Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 8 GB Laptop GPU I can easily play games in 4K but I like games at higher frame rates so I lower the resolution to 2K or lower.
@@Sc0ttyz23apparently, stuttering is very common on the 4000 series laptop GPUs. I have a 4070 and i9 13900hx laptop too, and I’m experiencing a LOT of stuttering. I’m curious, what brand is your laptop?
Shader Compilation in fact did not improve in 2023!
If it improved drastically in 2023, we won't see the results of it until currently in-development games come out :p
matter of fact, I came from the future and they didnt improve in 2025 😂
Lies of P, UE4 game. Compiles shaders. Incredible.
Edit: found out it's UE4 not 5 like I originally thought.
Lol no one caught that
Fromsoftware, wich released Elden Ring with heavy shader compilation stutters, released Armored Core 6 in 2023, with zero compilation stutter. They solved the issue in their engine and, probably, won't see them again in their games.
If you could go into an options menu and hit a compile shaders button, that would be great.
Some UE4 games stutter even after shader compilation is done like Atomic Heart and Callisto Protocol for example
star ocean the divine force have this option at option menu and it really works.
There's no need for a button. It should simply automatically pre-compile the shaders straight after installation, when the game boot's up for the first time. That first boot will take a lot longer, but who gives a damn if it gets rid of most of the stutters.
Aahhh i love office space quotes
Aaah these assholes again..Why pc games are bad and why pc kids are so dumb and annoying? 🤣😂
One thing to note is that while precompiled shaders on consoles are great, they also make backwards compatibility more challenging - even when the same hardware architecture is reused between generations. The APUs in the PS5 and Series S/X had to be custom designed specifically for compatibility with Gen8 shaders and thoroughly tested, which added to R&D time/costs.
Backwards compatibility is something PC gamers can just take for granted precisely because of the games not having precompiled shaders.
Ultimately everything is about trade-offs.
we need to get rid of backwards compatible, I think ps4 should be the only one supported since it doesn't affect the architecture
This is actually a hot take no one seems to think about lol. In the future consoles my NOT have precompiled shaders and the process might get to another instance like during the instalation or something
But even then, there's no technical reason why console games couldn't do the precompiled shaders on first launch on newer hardware.
But there's more to it than that, especially on PS consoles, being that they let developers go deep on low level access, which makes it much harder to have backwards compatibility.
Personally, I perfer the approach on the PC with Vulkan, which gives most of the benefits of lower level access to the hardware whiles having backwards compatibility.
As for shaders, I'm amazed it's still a issue when there are a few solutions around it, either by compiling the shaders on first load, or doing them ahead of time for the region you are in, yes it would use a little more cpu powers, but it's better that that stutter, and being as it only needs to do the shaders for the nearby region, it would use far less cpu power than doing it all, either way, thats got to be better than doing shaders on command which always does shader stutters.
@@marioslrzn Questionable opinion aside, there is no current console with backwards compatibility beyond PS4 on PS5 (and perhaps Xbone on XSeX). Everything else are either ports or specific emulators.
@@RippahRooJizah The Series X is backwards compatible beyond the Xbox One, but all of those Gen 6/7 titles had their shaders recompiled for the Xbox One'x x86 hardware and so the files are very different from what shipped on the original discs (hence a mandatory download).
The thing I am puzzled about is why shader compilations are a thing in more recent times then previously
It's simply because the shaders nowadays are far more complex, as are the APIs like Vulkan and DirectX.
Just guessing really, but I think it's because the complexity of the shader process has increased as the visual fidelity of the games has improved, so there's much more information for the GPU to interpret.
I think a mix of two factors.
1. The number of shader variants used in a typical title has increased dramatically as computers have gotten faster and we've pushed for more impressive visuals.
2. The increasing popularity of off the shelf game-engines that use "compile the shader the first time it's drawn" as a naive fallback behavior.
For 2, you wouldn't think the default would matter that much given the amount of work that goes into a game. There's nothing stopping you from adding an up-front shader compilation step when the game installs, or when it's started for the first time. However, there are a couple of reasons why this doesn't always happen. One is that modern games are often developed for console first where this isn't an issue, and then ported to PC. Another is that when games are being developed, tested, and QA'd, the cached compiled shaders don't get wiped often (if at all) so by the time you're at the polish stage of trying to clean up random stutters and drops, the game has likely been run hundreds of times on a given dev/test machine and the issue is no longer visible. You have to go out of your way to test on clean machines in order to see it, so unless a studio is aware of the issue specifically and takes special care, it's very easy for it just not to show up in the issue tracker.
Only Dx 12 and Vulkan suffer from this issue. Older APIs had different architecture and shaders could have been precompiled for PCs too
It was always a thing but you used to not notice it happening.
I'd gladly pre-compile my shaders if given the option, even if it adds under one hour of installation time. If that'd go for hours I'd still accept a partial shader cache pre-compilation if it means less stutter on first playthrough.
There are some games that precompile shaders on first launch (or when you update graphic driver) and while it's annoying to sit and wait for a few minutes for the process to occur, its far less annoying then throwing up on your keyboard because of stutter. I wish more game developers would pre-compile on launch.
Whats funny is that same game on same settings but running on DirectX11 can be buttery smooth while on DX12 it can be a stuttery mess
Dx12 is such a failure, vulkan is a lot better but the monopoly is on dx12 side...
"i honestly think things will improve in 2023"
-poor, naive richard
Well, Fromsoftware fixed them in their newer release, Armored Core 6, wich probably uses the same engine as Elden Ring.
Elden Ring had serious shader compilation stutters and, AFAIK, still has them to this very day.
He meant 2024. But yeah, with 3 players in the GPU market now (AMD, Nvidia, and Intel), things will only get more complicated, more GPUs to support. And instead of compiling them ONCE, after install, they now compile "when needed". Which is just BS.
Yeah, it cuts down on the install time. But at what cost? It absolutely ruins game immersion.
At the end of the day, the PC's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness and coming across experienced programmers who actually understand optimization and know how to do it across the major Engines like Unity, Unreal 4, Unreal 5, Godot, etc, is very hard. They're a rare species.
From my rough understanding, up to DirectX 11, Microsoft defined things like the shader format card manufacturers had to support in order to be DirectX 11 compliant. But Microsoft changed their approach with DirectX 12 so GPUs will use shaders compiled in their own native format which would best suit the hardware. The problem with this approach is that there's no way to pre-compile shaders for games because shader formats can change, not only between different GPU manufacturers, but even between GPU generations and driver versions. So you basically have to compile the shaders on the target hardware at runtime, which you didn't have to do with previous DirectX versions.
Half right. Both DX11 and DX12 require that shaders be precompiled to an intermediate representation (IR) that is shipped with the game (DXBC for DX11, DXIR for DX12), and that drivers take that IR and translate it to native machine code for the specific GPU used by the system. The difference between DX11 and DX12 is that under DX11 the driver was responsible for scheduling this translation, whereas under DX12 it's the developer that is responsible.
Under DX11 the developer basically takes the IR and bundles it into a shader object, then links the shader object to the DirectX state which tells the driver that specific shader object should be used for following draw calls or compute dispatches. Knowing what shader to use, DX11 is able to deal with the translation however it needs to, whether by translating in place or reusing a cached translation, whenever it wants to within the frame, whether at the start of the frame or immediately before the shader is needed.
Under DX12 the developer takes the IR and bundles it into a pipeline state object (PSO) description, then gives that description with the bundled IR and a whole slew of other state to DX12, where DX12 immediately builds the PSO and performs the IR translation in place, giving a handle representing the PSO back to the developer. When it comes time to issuing the draw calls or compute dispatches, the developer then takes that handle and gives it back to DX12, where DX12 then links it to the DirectX state which tells the driver that specific PSO should be used for those draw calls or compute dispatches (massive simplification, but it's easier to explain this way).
And therein lies the problem. The onus of deciding how and when to deal with building the PSO (and by extension translating the IR) falls on the developer under DX12, rather than the driver as is the case under DX11. If the developer wants to build ahead of time, they need to explicitly schedule that build to happen earlier in the frame or even multiple frames before the PSO is actually used. If the developer wants to reuse a cached PSO rather than build a new one, they need to explicitly specify the cache that is used.
I feel like the initial shader compilation can be done "silently" during install, and then with some cooperation from AMD and Nvidia and Intel, when a driver is updated, the user could allow background shader compilation in the background for select or all games, make it configurable. So that way as soon as a new driver is installed, the task happens in the background. I'd imagine consoles have something like this as the drivers have to be updated time to time right? Like it may not tell you it is doing that, but when a system update or game uodate installs I would assume in the background the driver is updated and shaders for the games are recompiled silently?
Maybe a better question is why games/drivers don't pre-compile shaders (like is done on e.g the steam deck via dxvk) more often instead of deferring it to happen during gameplay.
Well doesn't the Steam Deck basically apply to this answer since it's a fixed platform?
@@Biggie_Monkshader compilation(vulkan shaders) is avalible on linux in general via steam, it isn't juet the locked to steam deck
@@Biggie_Monk it's still treated more like a PC than a console.
@@ProTroy_ That's not what he's saying. You can pre-compile before playing the game, but after installation. There's no need to do it for dozens of GPUs, just the one in the system. That can of course mean that the shader cache takes up a lot of space on a users computer, or it may be difficult with shaders that are dynamic.
@@SilverEye91 Yeah that's what I meant. It happens if you use Steam on linux as well, it's not exlusive to the steam deck (or even steam for that matter). It takes up some space but not sure if that's really a worry seeing how much space these games take up anyhow and presumably they will cache stuff once it's compiled later anyhow.
It does mean some added time on first launch but I think it's preferable to have to wait a bit even if it's like up to like 5-10 minutes on first launch with a clear progress indication rather than having random stutters going through half the game (Or at least give you the option).
(In case of the deck they may have some pre-compiled shader downloads which might speed it up as well I'm not sure)
traversal/shader compilation stutter still present a year later. Nothing changed at all. :(
I just don't understand why shader compilation in UE is done synchronously (blocking). I think I would always prefer to just not see an effect for a couple of frames over stuttering. In my naive thoughts I would have something like a separate shader compilation thread that does the work, while the rendering thread would only use shaders that are already compiled.
I was gonna be like "they probably would find that unacceptable", then i remembered tons of games uses texture streaming with very obvious pop in on lower end machines. If they're fine with that, i feel like they could be okay with async.
It is an option in.. 5.2 I think? You can flag objects to be invisible until their shaders are compiled. Not great for cinematics and new effects that should be showing up pretty much full screen, (or even new enemies being invisible for a bit!) so you still need to solve precompilation, but it can reduce how much you need to do.
@@SimonBuchanNz Yeah, for sure. It definitely has a use for certain things
@@Liquifiedpizzas I think it's mainly a part of their push to better support open world
In a multiplayer game, that’s unacceptable. Imagine dying because the shadows on some grass didn’t render in and hide you from an enemy because they just installed the game.
The one advantage of living in South Africa is I can hire a native off the street to play through my Unreal powered games to do the shader Compilations first for like 10 bucks then I can play it afterwards without the problems.
Its the reason my 4070 doesnt get a workout anymore, i get games day 1 on my ps5. Hey atleast my indie games run at 240fps lol
to me this is just a sign of a lack of polish during the development cycle. Lets be real. Most games these days will be programmed with consoles in mind, therefore not needing any checks for a found shader in the cache. If you hastily port that to PC tho you will encounter the JIT fallback, which is terrible. It could be so easy these days.
whenever loading a save during loading screen check for all shaders in the upcoming scene and compile them, on linear games you could do triggerboxes that issue a compilation of stuff ahead and on more open games you can do the last approach but use a background thread to compile a list of "player COULD encounter this object" list.
It shouldnt be wizardry and full compiles upon game launch arent the solution either. There are so many way of combating this, most of us have 8 cores available and its purely a lack of polish because "time = money" apparently
Thank you was just wondering this makes perfect sense you guys are soooo underrated FR
I wish a game would just say "Come back in 10 mins, while I compile shaders for your hardware"....then run correctly!
Some games do that
I think devs should just add a "compile shaders" option to the main menu of their games. Forcing precompilation is not popular, particularly among low spec and less stutter sensitive players. Yet it is also not acceptable to never have the option of preventing stutter on a high end machine.
This is a question ive been wondering FOR YEARS. thanks
Perhaps they are required or preferred for consoles, and PCs are simply dealing with the consequences of that.
DF is never gomna forgive EA for Dead Space stutter 😂😂
Can developers add a dedicated "Compile Shaders" button in the settings menu to manually trigger the process? I think that might help.
Some games already do this, hell, Call of Duty has been doing this since 2019
Some games just do it in the stat up menu, games like Elden ring and Statfield just doing it in the menu. You can still play, or you can wait until all shaders are compiled.
@@tylerm5862 But even so still not all shaders are compiled and you still get struck with shader compilation issue..
Question of questions, thank you for covering this!
I never thought about shader compilation as an case-by-case thing. If one PC does it differently than another, it 100% makes sense that problems *must* arise, otherwise you would just, as on console, precompile it and bake it in. All sorts of things can go wrong on a custom machine, it's just disheartening that it goes wrong in at such high percentage rates.
WHat was mentioned in the end, regarding Apple silicone. I want to believe Apple is aiming to improve their performance by virtue of their low number of overall possible configurations.
What I don't get are the many games that need to compile shaders on every single startup.
3:07 This. So much this. Thanks DF team.
Why can't games compile shaders before the game starts? Why compile during gameplay?
As far as I understand this might not fix everything, but every game should at least have an optional shader precompilation feature. It's such a simple feature but can greatly benefit a lot of games
It's directx12. Every game that has it, and also dx11, works perfectly on dx11. Sometimes you have to force it, but the stutters are gone.
Maybe I should watch a video explaining what shaders are and why each change to hardware across PCs requires unique ones before rewatching this...
Shaders are basically small programs that run on your GPU to perform a certain task. For instance, if a game wanted to draw a box on the screen then there'd be at least two shaders required for that: a vertex shader and a fragment shader. The vertex shader is responsible for taking each vertex from the model of the box and figuring out where on screen that vertex would be given the position, rotation and scale of the box. The fragment shader is responsible for taking a bunch of data from the vertex shader and certain hardware stages to figure out what colour each pixel covered by the box should be. Because the program has to run on your GPU the shader has to be compiled to your GPU's native machine code, so any change in hardware causes a recompile since the GPU's native machine code may have changed with the addition of a new GPU.
So why in PCs they not compile all the shader on the BEFORE first Game run and every time there is a driver update? Isn't this THE SOLUTION? 🤷♂
i don't understand the shader compilation issue you fsced on Mac. I have RE Village and have played it all the way through on an M1 Max and never experienced this at all. Maybe they shipped precompiled shaders for some models and not others?
Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Library changed all this.
I would wait through 20-30 minutes of shader pre-compilation in a menu or the first boot of a game if it meant I could play the game without stutters.
At this point I'd wait a full 24 hours if it meant my game would work
That was how it was done back in the old days (before UT4). Nowdays its done "on fly", and both SSDs and CPUs cant keep it up as shaders become more complex and bigger.
@node3155 honestly having up wait one time is a really small price to pay. If that really would help, I'm more than ready to go back to that route
A few games I have by default will compile shaders on first start-up (for initial run, new hardware or updated drivers) instead of JITing them. It does mean that occasionally it takes a bit longer to load up the game, but I think that's a worthy tradeoff
Simple. The complexities are obviously too high if many artists tend to draw the same picture. but if you deploy just 1 of them to do the same thing and expect just that, it is really simple as you know what to expect and how to expect.
The sidestep is loading every shader/shader permutation in a given level on some surface visible to the camera (and also vfx, and any asset that's likely to cause stutter on load/spawn) during that level's loading screen. The loading screen would essentially be a plane right in front of the camera that doesn't participate in occlusion culling. At least that's how the teams I've worked on have solved it, when they went through the trouble to solve it.
You have to have at least one person on the team who's sensitive to shader compilation stutter, they have to see it happening and report it (assuming they will be believed or hold a position to make calls about such things), and you need folks who know this fix, and the time to implement it has to be available, and even if all that lines up, the bean counters have to approve spending that money on dev time instead of a thousand other things that need doing/fixing. Optimization is not as high on the priority list as I think it should be most times, but then most of the world is set up in ways that don't make sense to me, so maybe I'm the problem haha.
There are a lot of moving parts, and most people (myself included) aren't particularly sensitive to shader compilation stutter outside of large stutters of 0.5 seconds+. DF and the folks who consume DF content are far from a majority of people who play these games.
Dude, how can anyone be not sensitive to shader cache stutter when the game just freezes for a split second?
How long would it take to compile all shaders for a game I wonder? When starting a game from scratch, not from a save file, there are surely shaders that aren't needed till later in the game. So why not effectively buffer at the start until it's compiled enough to be stutter free. If you get a new driver, which you say requires recompilation, then buffer according to location in the game. Then in a separate low priority thread have it compile the rest. Alternate to that have a button in the graphics menu for the game that compilers all shaders and then you just wait till it's done.
I admit I haven't gamed on PC for quite a while, probably not since the WoW cataclysm expansion, so I'm probably being extremely naïve.
I hoped you guys could take a look at Bramble and The Mountain King game, it's such an incredible looking game.
Assuming you meant 2024, what makes you think they’ll improve? We’ve had shader compilation stutter in PC games for well over a decade. Is there some magical fix in the 2024 pipeline?
Quick look at description shows this clip is from 2022
really? a decade? I can't remember a single game where it happened prior to 2020. it seems to be specifically a recent Unreal Engine 4 and 5 console port problem.
Don't bullshit me. DX12 launched in 2015, and became widespread several years later. There weren't shader compilation stutters on previous APIs because they didn't need to compile during gameplay.
If you had stutters on OpenGL or DX11 (and previous) games is caused by something else. Prolly an underspec machine.
@@arsenii_yavorskyi It's a modern API problem. Even non UE4 games had them, most notably Elden Ring.
To solve you need to program a tool in your game that precompile shaders at launch, before gameplay. This tool, basically, renders every shader and compiles it. Of course, creating such a tool is a very time consuming job, and not every dev team makes it in time for the publisher deadline.
The magical fix would be to implement asynchronous shader compilation into UE5. It's better to simply not show something until the shader has been compiled in the background than to block the whole rendering thread for a couple of frames.
Games continue to have stuttering problems because most people don't know when the problem is in the game or because they lack a good PC, and companies take advantage of this. And when I see Dead Space Remake with great reviews on Steam I know that the problem isn't going to end anytime soon.
one of the main reason i swapped to console as a primary platform after years of console and PC gaming.
Terrible reason to switch to a far inferior product.
If that was your reason its pretty dumb to be honest.
The only reason to own a console is if you just wanna plug and play or your friends play on console.
it's the perfect reason.
Paying so much money for hassle isn't something most can tolerate, particularly as you get older.
PC gaming is very easy to grow out of.
go buy more ram@@zaxmaxlax
@@Clutch4IceCreamI've never gotten buyers remorse from a console. PC on the other hand...
i remember when i wondered why emulators can't just force compile all shaders at first boot of the game
the closest to the answer i got was someone on i think cemu forum saying something that went "because it is impossible to compile shaders before they're needed, as they don't exist before they're called"
sufficient to say, i never visited this forum since
Yeah, I've had shader compilations stutters on my PC that I don't have in the same game on my Steam Deck, which is a closed, standardized platform.
nope. there are no game versions made specifically for Steam Deck (most of the time, anyway). it runs either the regular Linux versions, or Windows versions through Proton compatibility layer, which is what actually fixes a lot of the problems.
@@arsenii_yavorskyi that's a funny reply, because I never said anything about games being made specifically for the Deck.
Why "closed"? I understand standardized (same hardware), but I didn't get the closed part.
It's not closed, is just predictable. Valve compiles and distributes the shaders. This gets rid of most but not all stutters.
@@tablettablete186 You know, the hardware is not open-sourced. (Hence, closed)
Set in Dead Space Remake the EA Spy Option to off in the Menu.
What I'm wondering is why wasn't this an issue up until a few years ago? At this point I'm not sure exactly when it started to become common, but it can't be more than 2-3 years. I'd never heard of shader compilation stutters before.
Shaders got a lot more complex with DX12 and UE4. Shader compilation was always a thing but in previous generations they were far less complex and so people wouldn't notice.
Forza Horizon just compile it's shaders on first launch, why doesn't other developers follows the same approach?
It gives you a smooth butter experience from first iteration till the last minute playing the game.
Why doesn't we have it on OTHER GAMES? WHY?
Playground uses their own engine for Forza. Maybe UE doesn't have proper support for shader compilation during startup.
Is it not an issue though? I can't remember the game but there was a video on a console game by DF that had issues staying consistent.
We don’t have that but we do have traversal stutter and frame pacing stutter.
Doesn't valves steam platform provide a preshader step where compiled shaders are downloaded once they are compiled (by other players) to your computer? You never mention this but in theory, it should have a big impact. Or not?
Does Elden Ring still stutter on PC like it did for months post-launch? Already beat it on PS5, but thinking about playing again on PC with my 5800X/3080 system.
It still stutters every now and then. Quite rare but if it stutters, then it freezes your screen for like one second.
Shader compilation does not mean stutter, the games that stutter all have Denuvo
I've heard this explanation many times, but I watched this hoping for more.
Specifically, why doesn't the game compile the shaders during the initial install, then check your hardware/drivers each time the game boots, and re-compiles during boot up as necessary.
This seems like a really obvious solution. So, I assume there's a reason developers don't do this. But I've never seen/read an explanation for why.
I think its because not all shaders can be compiled through that method. A good majority of them can but stuff like particles interacting with other particles and random elements still need to be generated on the fly. At best it can reduce stutter but not eliminate it entirely.
@SpudCommando I'm not convinced that is correct, since your reasoning should also apply to consols. Also, most PC games cache the compiled shaders. That's why micro-stutters are most prevalent during the first playthrough (DF even mentions this in passing in their video).
The engine often needs to be running in order to do the compilation. So the game has to at least be launched in order to do it.
There's no reason not to do that. Maybe UE doesn't properly support it. I don't know. But at least Forza on PC works exactly like that. After every hardware change or game update, the shaders are compiled at startup.
@@mechanicalmonk2020I don't see the problem with that. Many games start up with either a splash screen or a loading screen, during which the developer is free to do whatever, like compiling shaders
Make the shader compilation be part of the game download sequence! Or just have a pop up that asks, compile shaders before starring? It's not that hard
It'd be nice if the "compiling shaders" bit of some newer games actually worked (Jedi Survivor and Hogwart's Legacy....).
Oliver is looking terrifying
“Things should improve in 2023”.
Niiiiiiice ! lol
DirectStorage should also help, but it needs to actually be implemented in more games since it's not just a universal fix. Nvidia also has RTX IO, which has yet to be implemented in games. Both of these together should eliminate most of the issues, but it's going to be years until there's a wide adoption rate for either.
Also, try not patting yourselves on the back for games that ended up having a compilation option added. PC gamers have been complaining about this issue FOR YEARS.
Another reason I don't miss PC gaming. And this wasn't an issue. But I do hope to afford a decent gaming PC one day. Not in a rush. Don't have enough time for it anyway.
Just have a precompilation stage in every game lol
While this is the real reason, it's not an excuse. Game Devs have long developed methods to precompile shaders before the level loads on PC by simply simulating a camera flying through the level and hiding the entire process behind a loading screen.
I'm not sure why this isn't sufficient today.
Stutters are something PC gamers will never get rid of. All this talk about gaming CPUs with 3D cache or G-Sync/FreeSync. Nothing can stop a game from being a smooth 100fps and randomly dropping to 40 and going back to 100fps all within a fraction of a second. For the average person sitting down, they wont care. For the gamer who spend $1200 or $1500 on his PC it will bother the heck out of them, and will spend countless hours wondering which computer part is causing that. or is it just the game? yes. it is the game...
Its easier for the devs to release as is and wait for more powerful hardware in the future to handle it.
@@zaxmaxlaxExcept it doesn't happens, look at GTA IV
VRR doesn't help in this case, it just allows you to use the headroom you otherwise would need to create (by either lowering graphics settings or target frame rate) to avoid dropped frames.
So if for example most parts of a game would run at 90 fps, but some particularly heavy scenes only at 50 fps, you would need to limit the game to 30 fps (on a non-VRR fixed rate display) to get a stable frame rate, or use very aggressive dynamic resolution (which for some reason almost never works properly on the PC and only helps in GPU limited scenarios).
In short a PC is a Personal Computer that has graphics cards to run games.
Consoles are gaming machines dedicated to playing software built from the ground up.
Sincerely,
@@RyzenZegendexcept consoles have pc components in them now, pretty sure ps5/Xbox are ryzen, switch is Nvidia tegra, steam deck is amd as well this is an issue that can be fixed
It's because PC gamers would rather have high FPS. Lowering the FPS to get a more consistent experience is anathema
Why cant PC games compile shaders when installing?
If a driver update requires new shaders isn't that the case for some console updates too? What happens if they don't get updated on consoles after major OS updates?
I believe console games include the video driver. If you watch Dave Cutler's interview at Dave's Garage channel, he mentions that Xbox games are virtual machines that include a whole OS. Presumably, this means they also include a driver. Should be similar thing for Switch/PS games.
overall consoles are just easier. I have a decent gaming PC and still prefer playing most stuff on the PS5 because it's just easier. No goofy window drivers to come along and be broken by windows updates. MS abandoned windows quality, they test and have more eyes on the gaming lite version of windows in an xbox anymore than they do with vanilla windows
They do get it sometimes, but I’ve only seen it in one game this generation that I can remember and that is RedFall. Though, I don’t know if it’s shader compilation stutter, or some sort of streaming hitch. But it doesn’t happen all of the time. It seems to happen right as you walk out of the police station and down the steps to the dried out lake area. There’s a hitch that seems to happen every time you hit that spot. Other than that, I don’t remember it anywhere else in the game. I’ll have to play and see.
I was one of the few who enjoyed and enjoy the game still. they’ve made it better overtime with patches and it’s fun. It’s good old school fun in a way we don’t get very often anymore. Is it? Of course not. Not many games are these days. Even AAA seem to all have their issues. But it does when it sets out to do and that is entertain me. I’m OK with that.
When there's an option for developers to compile shaders ahead of time for shipping the console versions, why isn't it common practice for PC games compile all shaders to populate a cache when the game launches? Some games do this, but most don't, and this seems silly.
I get the different hardware? But why the drivers updates? Console has firmware updates and they never need to change the precompile shader.
Bcos consoles are better
its weird for me that this shader struggle doesnt seem to be this pronounced with Vulkan, maybe its an actual dx12 issue and Microsoft has to change that
I think that's more connected to which games are using Vulkan. It's mostly productions from experienced studios who use their own in-house engines, so it's more likely they understand such issues and can avoid / mitigate them properly. It's mostly the "we just click the build button in UE, it'll be fine" studios whose games suffer from stutter struggle.
This may be wrong, but I read somewhere that all shader states have to be known at build time with vulkan.
@@FOREST10PL This is the same for DX12. Vulkan has an extension that loosens this restriction but the extension has shoddy hardware support at best so no games are using it yet. For the most part anything that Vulkan offers to help with this, DX12 also offers.
I thought a lot of stutter in 2023 WAS traversal stutter NOT shader stutter?
Simple, for the same reason the Steam Deck doesn't, because of being a fixed hardware platform, the shaders are complied ahead of time, that something consoles can do and also the Steam Deck can do, it's actually possible to do the same on any PC but it's messy and not ideal.
In an ideal world, all games would do the shader compilation ahead of time as you play, being as it only needs to do ahead of time of the region you are in on the game, the resources needed would be quite small and it would be far better than doing as needed, as that creates stutter.
because adding feature to compile shaders on demand in options settings and wait even 1h is to much to ask for PC, what a bs
Either way console is better
Here's what still confuses me about this issue: If console games require shaders to be known at build time (to be compiled at build time), doesn't this mean that a PC version could use this list of shaders to compile them at runtime?
You need to do it for every GPU in existence that would run the game.
Of course you need to predict every GPU pc gamers will use.
@@mondodimotori Not for having just a list
@@mondodimotori A game only ever needs to compile shaders for the GPU in the current system, and since the list of required shaders is known in advance, this can be a step when launching or loading the game. Or even as a post-install step. And there are entities with the resources to actually do this. nVidia maintains a big cluster for all the performance profiling they use for GeForce Experience profiles, and that's the perfect resources (and delivery system) with which to precompile shaders per-gpu per-driver. It's not like every single different GPU and driver version would require shaders to be recompiled either. GPUs from the same generations shouldn't need different shaders, and not every driver revision is going to invalidate the shaders.
That's one thing I still don't understand. There are some games that do shader-precompilation, but still miss a couple of shaders, so either such a list doesn't exist, or isn't easily accessible. Also UE to my knowledge does support shader creation at run-time, in which case the shader can't be known when doing the build.
@@guspaz Games uses thousands, if not more, of shaders. Some of them are baked into the engine and are unknown to the developers.
it still requires time to pre compile all the shaders in house, if it could even be possible, since shaders on current API are compiled at a closer level to the hardware, meaning not even a same GPU could behave the exact same. It's not at driver level, where everything is predictable.
You are forced to compile them on the target machine.
And several games do exactly that. COD has been doing it since 2019 at least.
Pre complied shader through digital content delivery platform based on hardware would be ideal. However knowing publisher they would probably turn it into some form of DRM (i.e. oh sorry you purchased this game for gtx graphics so it won't work on rtx cards)
This is something Valve needs to take on. Similar to what they do for the Deck
Nah you can't do that (misusing it for DRM), that would be outrageous.
@@NeovanGoth lol do you know ea and Ubisoft? They already tie digital games to your hardware fingerprint
@@mechanicalmonk2020 they don't just do it for deck. They provide shader cache for all PC linux users. It's just not compiled.
little did they know how Dead Space would perform a month later...
That's why I keep consoles around~ , even though I already have gaming PC, sometimes PC can just randomly crash, or has random issues then I have to troubleshoot again before playing game.
PC all around machine meaning many things can go wrong too~ while Console strictly "Gaming device", that's what I like about it~ since personally i don't like same device for work and game together.
After owning Rog Ally, I spend less time on PC now, gaming on everywhere is nicer even when I taking care my kid.
You'll never sidestep shader compilation unless you do something silly like interpreted shaders.
Can’t they do this at launch?
I have zero stutter on 6900xt and 64gb ram 12700k0 and the game is installed on a separate gen 4 m2 drive . Zero stutter 4k ultra with reshade 45 to 70 fps with rtao . I dont know what this stutter argument comes from ??
6900 xt
xt is ps5 pro gpu
Sony now is working with AMD to put 6900 xt on ps5 pro apu
Even Starfield pre-compiles shaders, lol. I think ignorance among PC gamers will keep this problem going forever. The publishers don't seem to care about PC ports and many gamers either don't notice or just handwave this stuff saying "it only happens once", even though it generally happens constantly and at the worst times and is probably the most immersion breaking issue, bar the game completely crashing. Personally, I think it's 100% unacceptable for a game to be stuttering all the way through while playing it. I can't believe after decades of PC games evolving, we're literally at a point where the gaming experience is just worse than it ever was and this is fine for a lot of people. I have different PCs for different eras of gaming for compatibility and modern gaming is probably the worst overall experience if you encounter a game that doesn't pre-compile shaders.
Compiled shaders from each gpu/drivers combination should be distributed via p2p on PCs. This should not be that hard.
Technically PC games on Linux doesn't have compilation stutter on Steam games.
Valve implement a mechanism where a person share his high level shaders to the cloud and then you download it and precompile it using fossilize.
Thats why elden ring was supperior on Linux on the release date.
On PC, why cant they compile during the install
Didn't the Steam Deck (of all things) kind of solve this? Again, yes. One set of hardware, but it recompiles with every new driver or Proton update. And then gets downloaded like an update: tada: Shaders done.
Could devs utilize the cloud to allow auto-downloading shaders from other users with similar hardware that played? Similar to RyuSAK for Ryujinx Switch emulation.
Steam seems to be already attempting to do this (check Settings > Downloads > Shader pre-caching). Says it only works with Vulkan/oGL though.
That would take a lot longer than compiling them. The real solution would be to compile them on startup like some games already do.
you have destroyed UE5 games as an option for myself. So wanted to like Jedi Survivor but the stutters killed that and it should impact the review scores on PC.
I totally understand you. I bought Remnant 2 (which uses UE5) and it’s totally unplayable. Plagued with stuttering, even on lowest setting. Worst thing is that often you end up going above the two hours Steam limit just testing the game and troubleshooting the stutter problem, so goodbye refund
Here's my solution: my game has two shaders. They get compiled during boot.
shader compilations is because of the different hardware
What about a pre shader
So many excuses. We used to have hour long installations from discs. I am sure people with SSDs can stomach the game running a shader compilation pre-gameplay for a few minutes in order to not have lag spikes. Give me at least a option to pre-compile shaders to have a smoother game experience. This is as in-excusable as not having a FOV slider. And dont give me the storage space bs, with games taking up hundreds of gigabyte its not like devs care anymore to keep installs small anyways so what would abit more installation size to avoid lag during gameplay really hurt?
I dunno man it’s weird, I just don’t use my 1080ti anymore. Series x has been beyond what I expected. Yes maybe if my pc was faster I would be more willing to deal with all the troubleshooting to get things to run “perfectly”…but dang the Xbox experience is good nowadays.
Oh no....DF is saying exactly what John Carmack said over 10 years ago about console gaming vs PC gaming and "coding to the metal." The greatest strength of PC is also its greatest weakness, the diversity of hardware while allowing PC to reach levels of performance not possible on fixed hardware requires alot more development time and resources than console. This is perhaps the greatest reason that console exclusives are so important.....its the only way a developer can ensure that the they can create a somewhat uniform experience across an entire platform. Pc hardware is not uniform and thus not always possible to get a consistent level of performance across the spectrum of PC hardware. Because consoles are fixed hardware, they can have games made specifically for that hardware and if done correctly you will always get the best experience possible given power of that hardware.
Shader compilation/loading can get especially harsh on emulators such as RPCS3.
For example: Gran Turismo 5 has stacked up almost 100k shaders and the first shader loading pipeline takes forever to load! We're talking at least 20 minutes.
All game launches after that are pretty quick, but shutting down or restarting your PC means doing the long shader load again.
With full pathtracing you don't need shaders to be compiled.
No, you absolutely still do.
It just replaces cubemaps, reflection probes, that sort of thing, but the materials would still be PBR. Texture sampling would still need to be done, and various "effects" applied (either screen-space or particles). Shaders are also used for UI elements, text, terrain generation/tessellation, crunching various numbers (e.g. bounding volume hierarchies), dealing with transition textures (from one frame to another), etc.
Same with ray tracing. Path tracing is just ray tracing on steroids.
Of course you do. How do you think the color of each pixel is computed when using PT? With shaders. PT (and ray tracing in general) just gives those shaders much more information about the scene, so they can work in world space and not just screen space.
Path tracing needs the same amount, if not _more_ depending on how complex the pipeline is. Raytracing pipelines in DX12 and Vulkan require 2-3 shaders at minimum and can potentially have _dozens_ for handling hits, misses, hits and misses from different geometry groups, custom intersections, etc.
This has been my experience with PC just built a 13700k 4080 combo cost me almost 4k (yes I spent over 300$ in Lian Li fans) but majority of my games stutter there are some games that are just really well made Red Dead 2 is flawless, and Doom Eternal come to mind also stutter free, but been playing Space Marines 2 and PVP is stutter fest.
This is one of the big reasons why I still play games on my Xbox Series X even though i have a gaming laptop. Performance will always deliver no matter the game.
To begin with, a gaming laptop should not be a device used for heavy gaming. That thin build is not going to be able to handle as much heat as a bulkier Series X or full-blown Rig
@roguespartan2854 I mean these newer gaming laptops are pretty beastly and can even play video games at 4K 60FPS with ease if you are willing to spend the money.
The one I got I spent $1500 with these specs:
- Intel Core i9 13900HX (32 CPUs) 2.2GHz
- 32 GB System RAM
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 8 GB Laptop GPU
I can easily play games in 4K but I like games at higher frame rates so I lower the resolution to 2K or lower.
@@Sc0ttyz23apparently, stuttering is very common on the 4000 series laptop GPUs. I have a 4070 and i9 13900hx laptop too, and I’m experiencing a LOT of stuttering. I’m curious, what brand is your laptop?