Shader Compilation on PC: About to become a bigger bottleneck?

Scorn is on sale right now, and so I checked the forums to see if the shader compilation stuttering issues were fixed. I had tried the game in GamePass but the stuttering was unbearable. I checked the recent patch notes, and they added a pre-compilation step and updated the PSO cache for as much coverage as possible.

Greetings Scorn players,

We have some important updates to share with you. We will be implementing pre-caching of shaders to prevent stuttering during gameplay.

The previous update (FSR-Dec) lacked the PSO cache, causing some players to experience stuttering despite their configuration. This version of the PSO cache is improved and covers more cases to ensure that your gaming experience is as smooth as possible.

In response to feedback from some of our players, we are also adding Steam Trading Cards to the game. We hope that this feature will enhance your overall experience and provide an additional layer of engagement with Scorn.

Last but not least – Scorn is part of the Steam Spring Sale with both editions on sale at 40% off. So if you have yet to venture into the nightmarish labyrinth of Scorn, this is a great chance to do it.

Thank you for your continued support and stay tuned for more updates on Scorn.
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Looks like I'll finally pick it up and play this game! I wish more developers would go back and do this for released games. Particularly FF7R... but I digress lol.
 
@DavidGraham I'm more excited about the Renderer Parallelization in UE 5.4. That'll be a big deal in pushing frame rates. The final example he shows in City Sample with UE 5.4 optimizations reducing the render thread from 21ms to 11ms. That's an amazing improvement and "more to come."
 
Flappy Pannus said:
Also this, although at least on a 60hz display, I haven't noticed any issues with frame pacing with UE5 titles so far. Just glad to see this kind of thing being focused on.

View attachment 9774
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Typically when you're hitting high framerates in an Unreal Engine game, it's really smooth.. my only issues with frame delivery in most UE4+ games shader/traversal hitching.

But I imaging their focus is really to minimize input latency as much as possible so the engine works better with various frame generation techniques out there.

As you said though, good to see them working on this stuff. 5.4+ really seems like a big update.
 
Remij said:
Typically when you're hitting high framerates in an Unreal Engine game, it's really smooth.. my only issues with frame delivery in most UE4+ games shader/traversal hitching.

But I imaging their focus is really to minimize input latency as much as possible so the engine works better with various frame generation techniques out there.

As you said though, good to see them working on this stuff. 5.4+ really seems like a big update.
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It’s also likely to make sure they can keep the next generation of GPUs saturated with work. 4090 can have pretty low utilization without the best cpus and depending on the game. It’s making sure they can fully utilize cpus that already exist.
 
Digital Foundry: One thing I noticed on PC specifically is something that I have been talking about for years now. It makes me sad that I have to talk about it at all, but I want to know about PSO compilation. I'm curious how the game handles it for the PC platform, because the game doesn't stutter as we see in far too many other PC releases.

Nikolay Stefanov: We basically pre-built the PSOs and we shipped... I think around 3GB of PSOs on PC, something like that. It's a little bit crazy.

Oleksandr Koshlo: It's just a lot of variation. We also handle the loading of objects differently. I don't know if I should show all the cards here [everyone laughs].

Oleksandr Koshlo: Stutter should not be experienced in the game by design. If a PSO compilation needs to occur, that means the object will stream in later. We treat the compilation step as part of loading the object. Now technically, there can be bugs in the code which cause PSO stutter, but we look out for that. That's reported internally and we catch it. But that is not the norm. We take that very, very seriously.
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www.eurogamer.net

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - the big developer tech interview

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia interviews Massive's Nikolay Stefanov and Oleksandr Koshlo about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the Snowdrop engine.
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net
 
Someone asked an interesting question somewhere else ...

Are graphics pipeline libraries, shader objects and extended dynamic state planned?
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Jesse Natalie said:
No
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Based on the reply, PSOs in it's initial API abstraction for statement management is clearly here to stay indefinitely without any major refactors or replacement ...
 
Lurkmass said:
Someone asked an interesting question somewhere else ...



Based on the reply, PSOs in it's initial API abstraction for statement management is clearly here to stay indefinitely without any major refactors or replacement ...
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Where is "somewhere else"? I'd like more context.
 
Lurkmass said:
discord.com

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games

Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.
discord.com discord.com

Again, PSOs are here to stay without immediate plans of major functionality changes or a replacement for it ...
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Never said they weren't.. and nothing I'd ever seen gave me any indication that DirectX was planning to do so anyway.

Thanks for the link! :)
 
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