Nvidia rolls out its fix for PC gaming's "compiling shaders" wait times

arstechnica.com

10 points·Brajeshwar··6 comments

This is effectively what fossilize for steam can do. It records the shaders and structures at an intermediate level, then rebuilds them for the specific hardware. It also does distribution, so you always have ridiculously low shader compile times. I like it because it makes proton better than running under Windows because it eliminates shader stutter.

Couldn't they generate shaders for every model of card on the client side (or popular ones in their lab), and share them?

First person with a a Gigabyte Shlerp RTX 8000 compiles shaders and uploads them, everyone else gets the precompiled shaders.

I don't know what I'm talking about so gamedevs feel free to correct me.

> Nvidia’s Auto Shader Compiler is distinct from Microsoft’s Advanced Shader Delivery system, which lets developers generate databases of precompiled shaders that can be downloaded ahead of time to align with a player’s specific system. Nvidia said earlier this month that it is “working closely with Microsoft” to add Advanced Shader Delivery support to its GeForce RTX line “later this year.”

Shaders are mini programs running on GPU. It is possible to exploit them as vulnerability. You do not want to trust client provided executable code.

Idk, seems like a reasonable hurdle to overcome. What if everybody compiles them and sends them in for a brief period and the server picks the most common results.

Yep - so maybe signed from NVIDIA's lab for the top n cards?

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