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Does Anyone Else Skip Processing Vulkan Shaders? (aussie.zone)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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Title. I always skip them and don't notice any detrimental effects at all. I used to let them run every time, but I don't want to wait 5 minutes for every patch update bug fix anymore

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[–] 77 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Skipping vulkan shader compilation in steam will instead make shaders compile at runtime when game is running. You usually will not notice any issues, but if the game is grafically intensive and it suddenly has to load shaders which was not yet compiled, you will see the lags or stutters when they first appear. Also, depending on the hardware, game performace may be reduced while shaders are being compiled.

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  • [–] [S] 30 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    So basically, depending on the game, it's mostly fine to skip, but sometimes it's not, and if you have issues, try letting it compile?

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  • [–] 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    (edit) To be clear, I'm not an expert, and it's been at least a decade since I've had to work with shader programming. My knowledge could be completely outdated.

    Important to note that what happens when you skip it is exactly what happens with most games when you run them outside Steam (unless the game itself precompiles its shaders on first launch).

    When the graphics library (Vulkan, OpenGL, or DirectX) needs to load a shader, it first checks the shader cache (or pipeline cache in Vulkan's case) to see if it can find the compiled bytecode. If the bytecode exists (hit), it is loaded directly into VRAM, much like the machine code of an executable. If it doesn't (miss), the shader first has to be compiled from its source code into bytecode. This is a CPU-bound operation, which can introduce performance issues (stutters, freezes) and spike the CPU usage. After that, the resulting bytecode is stored in the cache.

    Steam does the same, but preemptively. It scans the game files and compiles and caches any shaders it can find. The difference is only in the timing.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago*

    To add to this, the compile time is usually in the range of a few ms each but often when you need to compile a new shader it's because a new entity appeared and there are likely several new shaders associated with that entity that you have to compile at once, so you could see a 100-200ms delay on the rendering for larger jobs.

    Often times if you change settings you'll trigger recompilation of some shaders. This can result in worse performance which people often attribute to their setting change (so they revert it/change it some more, triggering more shader compiling). So, make sure you play a bit once you've changed settings before judging the performance.

    Using something like MangoHud which displays CPU/GPU load and frame time graphs (and about a million other customizable things) you can generally see when you're having shader stuttering. Some games (Path of Exile 2, for example) have in-game performance monitor tools which will specifically tell you when shaders are compiling and how many are in the queue.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago

    Pretty much. I was playing BotW on an emulator that was using Vulkan and as I ran into new areas, or new enemies appeared it would stutter as things were compiling (it also has a debug option to tell me when new shaders were being compiled so I knew that’s what it was). I eventually switched to pre-compile. It took about 10 minutes, but after that everything ran silky smooth.

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