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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
Submitted 17 hours ago by mintiefresh@piefed.ca to games@lemmy.world
Comments
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Woof. I want to play BL4, I’ve always been a huge fan of the series, but like…I distinctly remember BL3 and watching Claptrap do that stupid Vanna White thing across the screen for ages after every update. I kind of want that time back.
MudMan@fedia.io 16 hours ago
Supposedly that's why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.
They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what's causing people's performance issues. I don't know that I agree, but there's probably part of it.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 15 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.
TachyonTele@piefed.social 16 hours ago
That loading screen takes forever. And the dance isn’t even entertaining, but you can tell they thought it was “hilarious”.
Plus all of the non stop talking in that game is ridiculous.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Maybe if there were any variation at all in the dance. Or a cycle of two or three different dances he goes through. Maybe give him a hat at random intervals. But no, just the same nonsense, over and over, for five minutes every time you start the game.
axexrx@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
BL has always been one of those series I end up playing with a 3-5 year lag time, picking them up when theyre $5-10 on steam.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I played BL2 at launch and don’t regret it. But I only just picked BL3 up again over the last couple of months. It wasn’t only the loading screen, but I will say I don’t think the writing shines quite as much as it did in BL2.
capt_wolf@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Remember how like… 5-10 years ago, games just… Kinda worked?
Darkenfolk@sh.itjust.works 47 minutes ago
I remember, it was in the lands of make believe I think.
ripcord@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
No, I don’t remember that at all.
Some did. Some didn’t.
otp@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
There was probably some peak, but I don’t think games as a whole every “just worked”.
If it wasn’t a problem with the game, it was a problem with your hardware.
echodot@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
What you on about, there’s always been crappy game releases. There’s a reason “can it run crisis” became a meme. That game is a lot older than 10 years old and it was a unoptimized mess when it was released.
alehel@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Isn’t 10 - 15 more accurate at this point? I think we’re older than we think.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
They did not.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I see a lot of folks trying to blame this on Unreal, but that makes no sense in light of other Unreal games being smooth for the visual fidelity, and Gearbox having worked with Unreal for literally forever.
This is all on Gearbox, and their CEO/devs throwing gas in the fire via Twitter.
onslaught545@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
That kinda sounds like when I tell people to unplug their router for a full minute because if I tell them 15 seconds they’ll only wait 5.
otp@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
No wonder the last guy thought we got disconnected 30s in after I told him I was unplugging my router.
“Sir? Are you still there?”
“Oh, yes. I was just waiting with the router unplugged.”
“Oh. Well… it’s probably fine now.”
“But it’s only been like 30 seconds.”
"Oh, has it? Well…uh, ok I guess.
TachyonTele@piefed.social 17 hours ago
“i already tried that”
We both know you didn’t. Just unplug the damn thing.
MudMan@fedia.io 17 hours ago
Yeah, the process will be different depending on CPU, so I'm assuming 15 min is the upper bound they're expecting on the minimum supported spec or whatever.
caut_R@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
If all the shaders are compiling in the background and it‘s stutter free (minus traversel stutters, I guess) after that, I actually find that reasonable. If I can get rid of stutters by idling in the game for 15m while doing something else, then sure.
But I have a hunch that it‘s still not a smooth ride after.
At least this is the most reasonable thing I‘ve heard from GB since release lol
LiveLM@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
Yeah sure but why didn’t they put a “Shader Compilation” loading screen then?
Many games have one that tell you what’s happening and give you an option to skip, better than having to find out via a tweet…MudMan@fedia.io 17 hours ago
My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.
I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.
And then there's the people talking about it who don't care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.
And then there's the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can't possibly help.
Lots of things on this one.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Why are games so shit nowadays? Besides UE5 slop I mean.
echodot@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
There are plenty of games made in UE5 that are good, it’s just this idiot doesn’t know how to use the engine.
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 17 hours ago
Here’s a dumb tech question: This happens for so many games, shaders compiling holding up the process. But after an initial compile, it seems like this is written to a file and doesn’t happen on every boot. So can they not simply include pre-compiled shaders?
TachyonTele@piefed.social 17 hours ago
They run differently based on the hardware you have. They can and might precompile for consoles, but there’s no way for them to know what everyone’s different pc set up is until it’s installed.
LiveLM@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
Fun fact: Steam (at least on Linux) shares caches between users with the same hardware.
Easier to happen on the Deck since it’s the same hardware for all, but even on my desktop PC I’ve seen it downloading and uploading shaders often.ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 15 hours ago
That makes sense, thank you.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Hahahaha, Bitchford at it again!
I really liked the first 2 games in the borderlands series, but TPS and 3 are just… Not great. I really want to try the Tiny Tina game, but I’ve heard that it as well is not great.
AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
Yeah, in the 15 minutes it takes to see if changing the setting caused any performance issues, I can easily just boot up Maze Mice and get through roughly 2 rounds with zero complications whatsoever. No need to change any settings from default or wait absurd lengths of time just to play a game without stuttering and other performance issues.
Also, your game is piss poorly optimized if you can’t get shader compiling working properly without tanking your experience in game.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
I’ve played a handful of games that precompile shaders at boot up without it taking 15 minutes, and they try to hide at least some of it behind the splash screens and such. This is absurd. If pre-compilation or caching is needed, just fucking do it.
On top of what you said, that any company with the funds of Gearbox has no excuse for not being able to optimize it to happen during runtime without tanking FPS.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 hours ago
I don’t understand exactly why but they’re not storing the computed shaders so you constantly have to redo it. But it also shouldn’t be taking that long anyway. It takes the new battlefield maybe 30 seconds to do this, so something weird is going on in the background.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Steam basically does this right, imo.
When you launch a game, and… your drivers have changed, or there’s been a substantial update to the game… it just tells you its compiling shaders before properly launching the game.
15 full minutes is pretty terrible though.
I think my worst ever is around 5 to 10, and that is when I am intentionally fucking about with mods and different versions of Proton.
inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Continue to wait 15+ minutes because this was already the case at launch and it still continued to stutter like a drunken frat boy.
Nikls94@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Hah, doesn’t have the balls to give them refunds.
ShadowRam@fedia.io 13 hours ago
tired of this game crashing.
I wait 15min for shader just to get into the menu, then continue, then wait another 5-10min for even more shaders...
play for an hour or so, and then it just crashes out.
mereo@piefed.ca 16 hours ago
[deleted]frongt@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/…/lyzqq8n/
Found with a single search. Short answer they can, long answer it’s more complicated. In any case, runtime compilation should never a be a thing on console.
echodot@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
Or I can download, install, and start playing literally any other game in less time.