Flappy Pannus
Veteran
So apparently the Day-1 patch for Horizon:Zero Dawn on PC will now compile all shaders at startup and create its cache after every new driver release - for 10-15 minutes. This will supposedly help reduce stuttering during gameplay.
This is a particular egregious example and from early accounts the port is somewhat shoddy all-around, but I've thought about this becoming a problem ever since the new consoles SSD architecture was unveiled. I've certainly noticed it in other games, Dishonored 2 takes 2-3 minutes to load after every new driver update (or when it just decides to recompile the shaders for the hell of it), the Call of Duty games can take an inordinate time to compile shaders as well if you choose than option. Loading levels in Mankind Divided after a new driver update can take considerably longer as well vs. playing it for a while on the same driver revision.
Shader compilation can normally be 'hidden' on PC titles during level loads or run in the background, but that can induce stuttering, and the risk of it happening is far greater in large open world games with lots of streaming and few, if any level load intermissions. Not having to compile shaders on consoles may be far more significant in overall load times when their storage/CPU speed is roughly equivalent to PC's as opposed to now.
Even if Microsoft for example were to provide a suspend-to-disk option for apps/games in a revision of Windows 10 that would allow a similar suspend/resume than the Series X is offering, how would that deal with a driver update when all the shaders would have to be recompiled? I'm sure the OS could tell the game "hold on, have to recompile shaders", but having to do so frequently would kind of suck out the utility of such a quick resume feature.
Steam does have the ability to download shader caches, but honestly I don't think I've ever seen an example of it actually working. So I'm curious - are there any approaches to this which could help alleviate this? Driver updates are frequent enough where I can see this requirement that consoles don't need would mean PC load times may end up being the longest of any platform, at least in the near future.
This is a particular egregious example and from early accounts the port is somewhat shoddy all-around, but I've thought about this becoming a problem ever since the new consoles SSD architecture was unveiled. I've certainly noticed it in other games, Dishonored 2 takes 2-3 minutes to load after every new driver update (or when it just decides to recompile the shaders for the hell of it), the Call of Duty games can take an inordinate time to compile shaders as well if you choose than option. Loading levels in Mankind Divided after a new driver update can take considerably longer as well vs. playing it for a while on the same driver revision.
Shader compilation can normally be 'hidden' on PC titles during level loads or run in the background, but that can induce stuttering, and the risk of it happening is far greater in large open world games with lots of streaming and few, if any level load intermissions. Not having to compile shaders on consoles may be far more significant in overall load times when their storage/CPU speed is roughly equivalent to PC's as opposed to now.
Even if Microsoft for example were to provide a suspend-to-disk option for apps/games in a revision of Windows 10 that would allow a similar suspend/resume than the Series X is offering, how would that deal with a driver update when all the shaders would have to be recompiled? I'm sure the OS could tell the game "hold on, have to recompile shaders", but having to do so frequently would kind of suck out the utility of such a quick resume feature.
Steam does have the ability to download shader caches, but honestly I don't think I've ever seen an example of it actually working. So I'm curious - are there any approaches to this which could help alleviate this? Driver updates are frequent enough where I can see this requirement that consoles don't need would mean PC load times may end up being the longest of any platform, at least in the near future.