Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox has asked PC gamers to wait 15 minutes for shaders to compile in the background while playing after some said this week’s update had caused increased stuttering.
I really liked the first 2 games in the borderlands series, but TPS and 3 are just… Not great. I really want to try the Tiny Tina game, but I’ve heard that it as well is not great.
And when I’ve tried it numerous times I’ll let them walk me through the process while I browse the internet for a couple minutes while I “wait for the light to turn green”
Nope, it’s still flashing yellow, like it has been, and has been after the last couple resets of everything between me and the wall
Yeah, the process will be different depending on CPU, so I’m assuming 15 min is the upper bound they’re expecting on the minimum supported spec or whatever.
John Carmack: We couldn’t figure out how to perfect virtual texture streaming. I’d walk backwards and turn and the world would reload textures. It just comes down to a problem with the implementation.
Randy: The technique is fine you just need to play differently.
Here’s a dumb tech question: This happens for so many games, shaders compiling holding up the process. But after an initial compile, it seems like this is written to a file and doesn’t happen on every boot. So can they not simply include pre-compiled shaders?
They run differently based on the hardware you have. They can and might precompile for consoles, but there’s no way for them to know what everyone’s different pc set up is until it’s installed.
Fun fact: Steam (at least on Linux) shares caches between users with the same hardware.
Easier to happen on the Deck since it’s the same hardware for all, but even on my desktop PC I’ve seen it downloading and uploading shaders often.
I see a lot of folks trying to blame this on Unreal, but that makes no sense in light of other Unreal games being smooth for the visual fidelity, and Gearbox having worked with Unreal for literally forever.
This is all on Gearbox, and their CEO/devs throwing gas in the fire via Twitter.
It’s honestly insane. There is clearly internal dysfunction at Gearbox, yet their CEO and leads are allowed to damage their brand to their hearts content with… no repercussions? WTF is Embracer (their parent) even doing to miss that?
UE5 by default uses a lot of flashy tech that is supposed to improve performance, but a lot of it only does so in scenarios that are already extremely unoptimized. Using more traditional methods tends to achieve the same fidelity at a fraction of the performance cost. But there’s no time for optimization, and these fancy options “just work”, so there ya go.
The end result is a poorly running blurry mess of a game, but at least it’s out on schedule I guess.
I looked up some videos from YouTube sleuths on why so many UE5 games suck. For any studio previously using UE3 or 4, they had to relearn/recreate nearly their entire workflow again. 5 very much changed damn near everything. But also that 5 has all this tech that everyone assumes works in all scenarios and is a miracle, when in reality it’s still software tech and has very real limitations and best use cases that studios ignore. Larger studios “should” be able to trial and error while burning through $ to figure it out, but usually management doesn’t give them enough time. Smaller studios can’t afford to have many many months of downtime learning to re-adapt everything. It’s just so damn complex that very few have had time and $ to just trial and error figure out its limitations and to work within them.
It SHOULD get better and better as time goes on, though. The tech pieces in 5 keep getting improvements, and theoretically people should eventually start to adapt to it correctly, and the knowledge should spread as devs move to different studios for new work.
Woof. I want to play BL4, I’ve always been a huge fan of the series, but like…I distinctly remember BL3 and watching Claptrap do that stupid Vanna White thing across the screen for ages after every update. I kind of want that time back.
I played BL2 at launch and don’t regret it. But I only just picked BL3 up again over the last couple of months. It wasn’t only the loading screen, but I will say I don’t think the writing shines quite as much as it did in BL2.
Maybe if there were any variation at all in the dance. Or a cycle of two or three different dances he goes through. Maybe give him a hat at random intervals. But no, just the same nonsense, over and over, for five minutes every time you start the game.
Supposedly that’s why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.
They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what’s causing people’s performance issues. I don’t know that I agree, but there’s probably part of it.
Fuck pitchford and all that. But this is an increasing problem that most games have. Shaders are getting more and more expensive and compiling them on the fly… when it works it works and when it doesn’t it is horrible. But having a mandatory “sit and watch this load screen for three minutes” starts you off with a HORRIBLE first impression during the period where it is easiest to get a refund.
It is why MS are setting up their convoluted, and destined to fail, system to add those to the downloads. Since people have increasingly been realizing that Proton/Linux weirdly have an advantage in this… that again mostly manifests during the first 30-40 minutes of benchmarking while writing a blog post.
In this case? Not sure if they were doing some shenanigans to lessen the cost of on the fly compiling. But odds are that some performance tweaks they put in a patch invalidated those and… yeah.
Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don’t want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very… terminally online, but it’s nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.
Also crazy that dev teams don’t have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.
I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just… heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.
And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it’s a stylized look and it’s taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you’re getting out of it.
Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I’ll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.
I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.
They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.
I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.
The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.
Maybe they could add a setting to automatically start up the game in the background after an update. Since shader compilation happens right at startup, that could get the job done.
Yes, there are issues with updates and cached shaders… I mean, look at the topic of the thread. But the vast majority of the time there are zero issues and, again, this has been one of the biggest causes of a lot of the “This game runs better on Linux than Windows!!!” because the fly by night org just rushed into a single scene and took very few samples.
If all the shaders are compiling in the background and it‘s stutter free (minus traversel stutters, I guess) after that, I actually find that reasonable. If I can get rid of stutters by idling in the game for 15m while doing something else, then sure.
But I have a hunch that it‘s still not a smooth ride after.
At least this is the most reasonable thing I‘ve heard from GB since release lol
Yeah sure but why didn’t they put a “Shader Compilation” loading screen then?
Many games have one that tell you what’s happening and give you an option to skip, better than having to find out via a tweet…
My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.
I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.
And then there’s the people talking about it who don’t care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.
And then there’s the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can’t possibly help.
Lots of things on this one.
Still I don’t think you’re expected to idle for fifteen minutes. That’s the point of the background compilation. You can still play more or less fine. Particularly on first boot the first fifteen of this should be a bunch of cutscenes anyway, and those lock at 30 (which I don’t like at all and so many games do now for some reason).
Found with a single search. Short answer they can, long answer it’s more complicated. In any case, runtime compilation should never a be a thing on console.
What you on about, there’s always been crappy game releases. There’s a reason “can it run crisis” became a meme. That game is a lot older than 10 years old and it was a unoptimized mess when it was released.
To be fair, Crytek said it wasn’t unoptimized, but graphically over tuned on purpose, so that even years after release new hardware could finally play the game to its full potential and keep it a relevant graphical benchmark. That on launch only a fraction of gaming PCs would come even close to playing it on max settings with high fps was intended.
If that was a stupid idea in hind sight is another matter 👀.
I heard nothing in CryEngine 2 was multithreaded because they bet on processors getting better single core performance instead of getting more cores (which is what happened). Not sure about the gpu load though
I feel like there have always been buggy releases. But I do feel they have gotten more frequent and have become the actual norm, with people being impressed when AAA releases don’t have deal breaking bugs on release
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Or I can download, install, and start playing literally any other game in less time.
Continue to wait 15+ minutes because this was already the case at launch and it still continued to stutter like a drunken frat boy.
Hahahaha, Bitchford at it again!
I really liked the first 2 games in the borderlands series, but TPS and 3 are just… Not great. I really want to try the Tiny Tina game, but I’ve heard that it as well is not great.
That kinda sounds like when I tell people to unplug their router for a full minute because if I tell them 15 seconds they’ll only wait 5.
“i already tried that”
We both know you didn’t. Just unplug the damn thing.
But I did
And when I’ve tried it numerous times I’ll let them walk me through the process while I browse the internet for a couple minutes while I “wait for the light to turn green”
Nope, it’s still flashing yellow, like it has been, and has been after the last couple resets of everything between me and the wall
Oh you’ll send a technician out? Thx.
No wonder the last guy thought we got disconnected 30s in after I told him I was unplugging my router.
“Sir? Are you still there?”
“Oh, yes. I was just waiting with the router unplugged.”
“Oh. Well… it’s probably fine now.”
“But it’s only been like 30 seconds.”
"Oh, has it? Well…uh, ok I guess.
Yeah, the process will be different depending on CPU, so I’m assuming 15 min is the upper bound they’re expecting on the minimum supported spec or whatever.
I’ve already written BL4 off. You don’t need to convince me any further. lol
John Carmack: We couldn’t figure out how to perfect virtual texture streaming. I’d walk backwards and turn and the world would reload textures. It just comes down to a problem with the implementation.
Randy: The technique is fine you just need to play differently.
Here’s a dumb tech question: This happens for so many games, shaders compiling holding up the process. But after an initial compile, it seems like this is written to a file and doesn’t happen on every boot. So can they not simply include pre-compiled shaders?
They run differently based on the hardware you have. They can and might precompile for consoles, but there’s no way for them to know what everyone’s different pc set up is until it’s installed.
That makes sense, thank you.
Fun fact: Steam (at least on Linux) shares caches between users with the same hardware.
Easier to happen on the Deck since it’s the same hardware for all, but even on my desktop PC I’ve seen it downloading and uploading shaders often.
I think Valve or others have proposed creating a standard for this for just this purpose.
Isn’t fossilize exactly that? A serialisation format for shaders.
That might be the one I was thinking of. It rings a bell.
I see a lot of folks trying to blame this on Unreal, but that makes no sense in light of other Unreal games being smooth for the visual fidelity, and Gearbox having worked with Unreal for literally forever.
This is all on Gearbox, and their CEO/devs throwing gas in the fire via Twitter.
It’s honestly insane. There is clearly internal dysfunction at Gearbox, yet their CEO and leads are allowed to damage their brand to their hearts content with… no repercussions? WTF is Embracer (their parent) even doing to miss that?
UE5 by default uses a lot of flashy tech that is supposed to improve performance, but a lot of it only does so in scenarios that are already extremely unoptimized. Using more traditional methods tends to achieve the same fidelity at a fraction of the performance cost. But there’s no time for optimization, and these fancy options “just work”, so there ya go.
The end result is a poorly running blurry mess of a game, but at least it’s out on schedule I guess.
I looked up some videos from YouTube sleuths on why so many UE5 games suck. For any studio previously using UE3 or 4, they had to relearn/recreate nearly their entire workflow again. 5 very much changed damn near everything. But also that 5 has all this tech that everyone assumes works in all scenarios and is a miracle, when in reality it’s still software tech and has very real limitations and best use cases that studios ignore. Larger studios “should” be able to trial and error while burning through $ to figure it out, but usually management doesn’t give them enough time. Smaller studios can’t afford to have many many months of downtime learning to re-adapt everything. It’s just so damn complex that very few have had time and $ to just trial and error figure out its limitations and to work within them.
It SHOULD get better and better as time goes on, though. The tech pieces in 5 keep getting improvements, and theoretically people should eventually start to adapt to it correctly, and the knowledge should spread as devs move to different studios for new work.
They got sold off from embracer back to 2K just over a year ago.
Woof. I want to play BL4, I’ve always been a huge fan of the series, but like…I distinctly remember BL3 and watching Claptrap do that stupid Vanna White thing across the screen for ages after every update. I kind of want that time back.
BL has always been one of those series I end up playing with a 3-5 year lag time, picking them up when theyre $5-10 on steam.
I played BL2 at launch and don’t regret it. But I only just picked BL3 up again over the last couple of months. It wasn’t only the loading screen, but I will say I don’t think the writing shines quite as much as it did in BL2.
That loading screen takes forever. And the dance isn’t even entertaining, but you can tell they thought it was “hilarious”.
Plus all of the non stop talking in that game is ridiculous.
Maybe if there were any variation at all in the dance. Or a cycle of two or three different dances he goes through. Maybe give him a hat at random intervals. But no, just the same nonsense, over and over, for five minutes every time you start the game.
Supposedly that’s why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.
They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what’s causing people’s performance issues. I don’t know that I agree, but there’s probably part of it.
Yeah.
Fuck pitchford and all that. But this is an increasing problem that most games have. Shaders are getting more and more expensive and compiling them on the fly… when it works it works and when it doesn’t it is horrible. But having a mandatory “sit and watch this load screen for three minutes” starts you off with a HORRIBLE first impression during the period where it is easiest to get a refund.
It is why MS are setting up their convoluted, and destined to fail, system to add those to the downloads. Since people have increasingly been realizing that Proton/Linux weirdly have an advantage in this… that again mostly manifests during the first 30-40 minutes of benchmarking while writing a blog post.
In this case? Not sure if they were doing some shenanigans to lessen the cost of on the fly compiling. But odds are that some performance tweaks they put in a patch invalidated those and… yeah.
Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don’t want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very… terminally online, but it’s nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.
Also crazy that dev teams don’t have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.
I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just… heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.
And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it’s a stylized look and it’s taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you’re getting out of it.
Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I’ll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.
I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.
They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.
I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.
The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.
Maybe they could add a setting to automatically start up the game in the background after an update. Since shader compilation happens right at startup, that could get the job done.
Thank you for that info! I do most of my PC gaming on a very underpowered Linux box. Gonna need to check that setting.
Turning the Stream shader feature of was the only way I could get Dune to run without a shader error crash. Good Enough is always problematic.
One game has issues -> “always problematic”
Yes, there are issues with updates and cached shaders… I mean, look at the topic of the thread. But the vast majority of the time there are zero issues and, again, this has been one of the biggest causes of a lot of the “This game runs better on Linux than Windows!!!” because the fly by night org just rushed into a single scene and took very few samples.
If all the shaders are compiling in the background and it‘s stutter free (minus traversel stutters, I guess) after that, I actually find that reasonable. If I can get rid of stutters by idling in the game for 15m while doing something else, then sure.
But I have a hunch that it‘s still not a smooth ride after.
At least this is the most reasonable thing I‘ve heard from GB since release lol
Yeah sure but why didn’t they put a “Shader Compilation” loading screen then?
Many games have one that tell you what’s happening and give you an option to skip, better than having to find out via a tweet…
My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.
I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.
And then there’s the people talking about it who don’t care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.
And then there’s the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can’t possibly help.
Lots of things on this one.
Still I don’t think you’re expected to idle for fifteen minutes. That’s the point of the background compilation. You can still play more or less fine. Particularly on first boot the first fifteen of this should be a bunch of cutscenes anyway, and those lock at 30 (which I don’t like at all and so many games do now for some reason).
Gearbox, fire your CEO.
Just replace it by AI
deleted by creator
https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1gzu2ft/i_thought_compiling_shaders_before_loading_in_a/lyzqq8n/
Found with a single search. Short answer they can, long answer it’s more complicated. In any case, runtime compilation should never a be a thing on console.
Hah, doesn’t have the balls to give them refunds.
Remember how like… 5-10 years ago, games just… Kinda worked?
They did not.
What you on about, there’s always been crappy game releases. There’s a reason “can it run crisis” became a meme. That game is a lot older than 10 years old and it was a unoptimized mess when it was released.
To be fair, Crytek said it wasn’t unoptimized, but graphically over tuned on purpose, so that even years after release new hardware could finally play the game to its full potential and keep it a relevant graphical benchmark. That on launch only a fraction of gaming PCs would come even close to playing it on max settings with high fps was intended.
If that was a stupid idea in hind sight is another matter 👀.
I heard nothing in CryEngine 2 was multithreaded because they bet on processors getting better single core performance instead of getting more cores (which is what happened). Not sure about the gpu load though
Ooooo, that’s a nice fun fact, ty!
There was probably some peak, but I don’t think games as a whole every “just worked”.
If it wasn’t a problem with the game, it was a problem with your hardware.
Isn’t 10 - 15 more accurate at this point? I think we’re older than we think.
I remember, it was in the lands of make believe and nostalgia I think.
Or when they didn’t have zero day patches because it was a cartridge.
No, I don’t remember that at all.
Some did. Some didn’t.
I feel like there have always been buggy releases. But I do feel they have gotten more frequent and have become the actual norm, with people being impressed when AAA releases don’t have deal breaking bugs on release