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.
I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.
They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.
I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.
The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.
Maybe they could add a setting to automatically start up the game in the background after an update. Since shader compilation happens right at startup, that could get the job done.
Yes, there are issues with updates and cached shaders… I mean, look at the topic of the thread. But the vast majority of the time there are zero issues and, again, this has been one of the biggest causes of a lot of the “This game runs better on Linux than Windows!!!” because the fly by night org just rushed into a single scene and took very few samples.
I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.
They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.
I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.
The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.
Maybe they could add a setting to automatically start up the game in the background after an update. Since shader compilation happens right at startup, that could get the job done.
Turning the Stream shader feature of was the only way I could get Dune to run without a shader error crash. Good Enough is always problematic.
One game has issues -> “always problematic”
Yes, there are issues with updates and cached shaders… I mean, look at the topic of the thread. But the vast majority of the time there are zero issues and, again, this has been one of the biggest causes of a lot of the “This game runs better on Linux than Windows!!!” because the fly by night org just rushed into a single scene and took very few samples.
Thank you for that info! I do most of my PC gaming on a very underpowered Linux box. Gonna need to check that setting.