Post #2784715

2026-05-12 14:21 UTC

One of the reasons I don't trust LLMs is there's so much incorrect info on the internet that they're ingesting. While researching shader stutters, some people confidently state that every time you start the game you should load every level and play every effect behind an opaque loading screen for a few seconds to prime the shaders. And sure, this works, but it's just not needed. UE gives you a way to record shader use while in dev, and exposes it as a "shaders left to compile" var at startup

Replies (1)

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-05-12 14:24

It doesn't help that they obscure this behind confused naming conventions in the docs, admittedly. "Precache PSOs" actually means "on demand shader compilation with placeholders" in practice, wheras the far more useful feature is "bundled PSOs", which involves recording your shader usage in dev so that the engine startup process can know which shaders to make sure are compiled (a one-time thing barring the cache getting wiped by driver updates etc)

Open ##2784716