Question Shaders question...

[favreervaf]

Someone else has had to of notice this...Do all PC games general download shaders? The reason I ask is, when I use to have nvidia card and I would get a new driver update, the first time after that when I started Apex Legends, it would "compile shaders", just the one time after driver update. With AMD card now I've never seen that. Does it happen without us knowing? For other games like Hunt Showdown or BF2042 does it happen per map, like the first time you play it might be a little stuttery because the shaders are being downloaded? It would be nice if all games told you. Any insight would be appreciated.

Cheers

 

[hotaru.hino]

Apex Legends is likely doing what's called shader caching, which can help improve performance. Some games have an option to enable or disable it (off the top of my head I know Call of Duty: Black Ops has such an option), some games will just do it anyway.

And no, shaders are not being downloaded. Shaders could be thought of as tiny little programs that the GPU runs to render an image. So the computer has to create those, which creating a program for running is generally called "compiling."