Basically sort of the look of Half-Life 2 where it's too plain and sharp and textures are obvious, etc. You know, that look of 3D games were it's just the pure polys and textures and it feels like it could use more shadowing, some depth of field, some motion blur, some bloom, manual adjustment of pixel lighting, brightness, darkness, add occulion, improve reflections, specular, etc. So I'm curious - are there any approaches to this which could help alleviate this? Driver updates are frequent enough where I can see this requirement that consoles don't need would mean PC load times may end up being the longest of any platform, at least in the near future.I just got Burnout Paradise and found the built in SSAO feature for PC ground my system to a halt but I thought the vanilla game looked 'too clean'. Steam does have the ability to download shader caches, but honestly I don't think I've ever seen an example of it actually working. Not having to compile shaders on consoles may be far more significant in overall load times when their storage/CPU speed is roughly equivalent to PC's as opposed to now.Įven if Microsoft for example were to provide a suspend-to-disk option for apps/games in a revision of Windows 10 that would allow a similar suspend/resume than the Series X is offering, how would that deal with a driver update when all the shaders would have to be recompiled? I'm sure the OS could tell the game 'hold on, have to recompile shaders', but having to do so frequently would kind of suck out the utility of such a quick resume feature. Shader compilation can normally be 'hidden' on PC titles during level loads or run in the background, but that can induce stuttering, and the risk of it happening is far greater in large open world games with lots of streaming and few, if any level load intermissions. playing it for a while on the same driver revision. Loading levels in Mankind Divided after a new driver update can take considerably longer as well vs. I've certainly noticed it in other games, Dishonored 2 takes 2-3 minutes to load after every new driver update (or when it just decides to recompile the shaders for the hell of it), the Call of Duty games can take an inordinate time to compile shaders as well if you choose than option. This is a particular egregious example and from early accounts the port is somewhat shoddy all-around, but I've thought about this becoming a problem ever since the new consoles SSD architecture was unveiled. This will supposedly help reduce stuttering during gameplay.

So apparently the Day-1 patch for Horizon:Zero Dawn on PC will now compile all shaders at startup and create its cache after every new driver release - for 10-15 minutes.

Enbseries is compiling game shaders