Community MetaSteam | December 2022 - The end of the year is coming, you better hurry with those games!

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LEANIJA

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May 5, 2019
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fokkusu

Burn baby burn🔥🎵
Dec 9, 2018
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Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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And I still don't understand why.
I mean know why, but I also feel like the tools to avoid it are all there, yet... aren't used?
Like, shader compilation stutter happens because shaders can't be pre-compiled for PC and are instead compiled when needed.
This doesn't happen on consoles, because they are a fixed target, so pre-compilation is possible.
Since pre-compilation is possible, it means the engine has to be aware of all shaders.
Since the engine is aware of all shaders, why is it such an issue to move the pre-compilation step from "in-engine" to "somewhere in the game where it doesn't bother anyone". I.e. First time loading, or in the background while in the main menu, etc.
This seems so completely straightforward that it's absolutely mystifying to me why this isn't already standard practice. Yet even UE5 seemingly hasn't figured this shit out.
Honestly, this is on the engine more than anything else, but there are so many ways it could be fixed -- and of course, has been fixed in better-engineered PC games.
  • As you say, pre-compilation of shaders could be provided by the engine as a simple in-game feature, perhaps in the background in parallel in the menu and/or during some intro animation.
    Even if the engine fails to make it as easy as it should, a game could still do it, and if it is some AA+ game by a decently sized developer really has not excuse not to.
  • However, at the same time, if Microsoft were actually serious about their graphics API (DX12) and Windows as a gaming platform, they could resolve this issue on their own. Valve did that for Vulkan using fossilize, which gathers and distributes precompiled shaders/pipelines. However, while Valve can do this for Vulkan due to its well-designed layer architecture which can support arbitrary additional functionality layers, they couldn't do it for DX12 even if they wanted to since it lacks such a mechanism.
    However, Microsoft, controlling both the API and the OS, could absolutely do it.
  • If both the publishers/developers and Microsoft fail, Nvidia could add to their ample reserve of QoL selling points by doing it using Geforce Experience. They already have a huge cluster to test settings on all their hardware going a few gens back. They obviously have the resources to extend this to gather binary pipeline caches per-hardware and game, and with Geforce Experience they have the perfect distribution mechanism for those.
    Of course, AMD could also do the same thing to one-up NV with an actual novel and very useful exclusive driver feature for once.
  • Finally, I have a strong feeling (confirmed by some of my own small-scale experiments for at least some renderers) that the combinatorial shader explosion in many engines/games is stupid -- at least on PC, but maybe even on modern consoles -- anyway. Everything would actually run better in aggregate with much fewer shader variations that, as a tradeoff, have slightly more runtime branching. We're no longer in the early-to-mid-2010s where branching in shaders was a huge performance loss.
Honestly, if we had some spare capacity I'd be tempted to try and make a third party tool for out-of-game ahead-of-time pipeline-cache-warmup. I think it's absolutely doable. However, (i) it's a lot more engineering and integration effort than it would be to just do things right for literally any other player involved in this stack, and (ii) it might be impossible to do it commercially since it could easily be argued that the whatever on-disk pipeline representation we would ship is derived from a given game and distributing it violates copyright.
 

Parsnip

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Sep 11, 2018
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The thing I've been wondering about with shader stutter is how exactly is DX11 and OGL different from DX12 and Vulkan with how this shader stuff works? I know they are lower level APIs but what I mean is what is it exactly about the modern APIs that this is an issue now but not before? How is the DX12 and Vulkan pipeline state different from how things worked previously?
 

Censored

I didn't delete that post!. Get my post back!.
Oct 8, 2021
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Updated version of original sealed PC fate bigboxes
I'm so happy I was looking for that Sakura Matou plush for ages and I finally found it on a japanese store ^^. I even was scammed by a japanese ebay seller once.
EDIT: I've bought the new Unlimited Blade Works #1 & #2 manga and Famitsu's Witch on the Holy Night issue because they were gifting some nice cardboard sheet from the game.
that said tomorrow releases
 
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FunnyJay

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Apr 6, 2019
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I watched that Crime Boss: Rockay City trailer, and it gave me both a crappy Payday 2 clone vibe and reminded me of that old infamous E3 Killzone trailer that was completely fake. Everything looks so...... fake.
 

dfghstrbght

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May 10, 2019
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well I finished my replay of Yakuza 0 main story, guess I'll do some clean up, I'm like a week ahead in my schedule as I wanted to start Persona 5 Royal just as my off works rolled around....but maybe I'll start a bit early this week end?
 

spindoctor

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Jun 9, 2019
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I debated whether or not to post this in the hardware thread but decided to put it here because these are just some general thoughts I have on PC hardware right now.

So I built a mostly full new PC in the last couple of weeks. Unlike in the past, this time around I did not really enjoy the process, and on reflection I'm a little sad about that. I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting older, or if it's because of my physical/mental condition, or just the general state of the economy and the computer hardware market in particular. Probably a combination of all those factors.

There was a time when building a new PC was exciting. I loved reading reviews and comparing all the various components I'd consider buying. Shopping around for the best deals. Technology moved fast enough that you could always learn something about new components (at a high level) between builds every few years. And when you got the components, assembling the PC was fun as well. I've watched as assembling a PC has become easier (almost idiot proof) over the years because smart designers make it almost impossible to mess things up. This is a big deal even though I'm sure it's still kind of daunting for people who are new to this hobby. If you're old enough, you might remember AGP slots that were the predecessor to PCI-E slots we have today. Installing GPUs in AGP slots used to be a nightmare because they were really tight and you had to really struggle to slot them in. About 20 years ago I broke a brand new GeForce 2 because I lost the fight against an AGP slot. Nowadays there is no way to fuck it up. Even PC cases have been (over?)designed to make things so simple. You can disassemble so many parts to make it easier to install different types of components or reconfigure your setup. Everything is thoughtfully designed to make your life easier.

This time around I really struggled to make up my mind for almost every component. The decisions seemed to mirror so many real life decisions where you have to consider tradeoffs and compromises and generally the prices of everything seemed inflated. I did end up putting together a fairly high end machine but the prices of everything still bothered me. I'd been wanting to upgrade for a few months but I held off to wait for the Zen4/AM5 release. When that did happen, I spent about a month going back and forth on whether to buy that or go with Intel. Once the CPU was decided, choosing a motherboard was like walking into a minefield because of how stupidly expensive they've gotten. Motherboards that cost less sometimes have substantial compromises and you really need to get into the weeds to make sure you're not missing something you need. Even expensive motherboards skimp on SATA ports as if that's some sort of obsolete technology. DDR5 RAM is expensive. Nothing needs to be said about GPU prices. And all these new components are power hungry and run hot so you need a high capacity PSU (expensive) and high quality cooling (expensive). And GPUs are getting physically huge so you need a large cabinet (expensive). In short, everything was expensive to buy, including the new NVME SSDs I had to get because of there not being enough SATA ports on my motherboard of choice.

And then the assembly. I had to get someone to come to my place and help me build it because I was not physically able to do it myself. And I made a silly mistake while building it so after taking 7 hours to assemble, the PC wouldn't boot. After troubleshooting for a couple of hours, the guy had to leave because it was late and couldn't come back until 2 days later. So for 2 days I was stressed out about what had gone wrong because I was not able to troubleshoot it or fix it myself. I only figured out my mistake while chatting with derExperte who asked me if I had done something quite obvious and I was like "Wait, what?" :surrenderblob:

Anyway now that it's built I'm quite happy with it. It's very powerful and it's nice to see huge fps numbers in the couple of games I'm playing. But you know how you go back and download heavy older games when you get new hardware to see how they run? Portal RTX. Witcher 3 RTX. Star Citizen. Flight Simulator. For one reason or another I don't feel like getting any of them. Weird.

One last thought. I was using Windows 10 on my old PC and never upgraded to 11. I figured with the new build I'd finally start 11 since I would have to install a fresh OS. So anyway, I know I'm a year late, but damn Win 11 sucks. I'm sure a lot of folks who have been using it for a while will have gotten used to it by now and think it's not that bad, but god damn it makes a horrible first impression.

Anyway sorry about this long and aimless rant about PC hardware. Just sort of got carried away with it.
 
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