Finally, a Fix for PC Gaming's Most Annoying Loading Screen

Photo by tansu sayıner on Unsplash
You know that incredibly frustrating moment when you launch a game after a driver update and it sits there for what feels like forever saying “compiling shaders”? Yeah, Nvidia just announced a way to make that problem basically disappear.
The tech giant rolled out a new feature called Auto Shader Compilation as part of the latest beta version of the Nvidia App. Here’s the deal: when your computer is just sitting there doing nothing, this feature automatically compiles the shaders your games need in the background. So the next time you fire up a game after a driver update, you won’t have to wait around staring at a loading screen.
To use it, you’ll need to download the latest Nvidia App and head to the Graphics Tab, then Global Settings, and finally Shader Cache. From there, you can turn on the feature and decide how much disk space and system resources you want to dedicate to the background compilation process. You can even manually force shader recompilation whenever you want instead of waiting for your computer to be idle.
There’s one catch though: this only works for subsequent driver updates. If you download a brand new game, you’ll still have to generate shaders the first time you launch it. But honestly, that’s way better than having to deal with it every single time there’s a driver update.
Nvidia isn’t the only company trying to solve this annoying problem. Microsoft has been working on something called Advanced Shader Delivery, which lets game developers create pre-compiled shader databases that download before you even play. Intel is also in on the action with its own Precompiled Shader Delivery system that’s supposedly three times faster for loading games. Nvidia said it’s working with Microsoft to add Advanced Shader Delivery support to GeForce RTX cards later this year, and Intel is planning to integrate with Microsoft’s system around the same time.
So what does all this mean for you? Well, it means PC gaming load times are about to get a whole lot less annoying. Whether you’re waiting for Nvidia, Microsoft, or Intel’s solution, the days of watching “compiling shaders” spin on your screen are slowly becoming a thing of the past. For now, if you’ve got an Nvidia card, go grab that beta version of the Nvidia App and never suffer through those wait times again.
AUTHOR: mei
SOURCE: Ars Technica
























































