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Comment on Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering - IGN

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NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Yeah.

Fuck pitchford and all that. But this is an increasing problem that most games have. Shaders are getting more and more expensive and compiling them on the fly… when it works it works and when it doesn’t it is horrible. But having a mandatory “sit and watch this load screen for three minutes” starts you off with a HORRIBLE first impression during the period where it is easiest to get a refund.

It is why MS are setting up their convoluted, and destined to fail, system to add those to the downloads. Since people have increasingly been realizing that Proton/Linux weirdly have an advantage in this… that again mostly manifests during the first 30-40 minutes of benchmarking while writing a blog post.

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ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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- NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Dvixen@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Thank you for that info! I do most of my PC gaming on a very underpowered Linux box. Gonna need to check that setting.
    
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MudMan@fedia.io ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don't want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very... terminally online, but it's nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.

Also crazy that dev teams don't have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.

I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just... heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.

And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it's a stylized look and it's taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you're getting out of it.

Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I'll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.

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