why are they so eternally assblasted about pc ports?
https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-current-state-of-pc-gaming-is-wild.687601/
the majority of PC gamers don't even play AAA Unreal Engine games or buy games on the day of release.
There's a real issue with the shader compiling though, many new games perform quite bad on PC even if you have a fast SSD.
PC gaming really had a chance to get more traction with the PS5 shortages but everyone involved shit the bed.
I keep reading about the shader stutter thing and don’t know if it’s always been around or a modern problem. On my ancient 1070 I’m forced to struggle settings anyway. So I’m well aware of the bottleneck for me. But what needs to be fixed for PCs if 4090s choke? SSD are the limitation? Does that direct storage thing forspoken did help?
It has to do with shaders.
Basically the console hardware is always the same so the shaders are pre-compiled for maybe 2 or 3 different modes (performance, fidelity). On Steamdeck the GPU is always identical so Valve implemented a shader cache at a low level too.
On PC's however each hardware set-up is different and so are the settings so as you play the game your CPU compiles the shaders in the background and the GPU has to wait for the assets to compile causing a stutter.
This also has to be done again after every driver or game update. It's a bigger problem with more powerful GPU's as you would obviously max out all the settings, increasing the time it takes to compile everything.
It's also a big problem on GPU's with limited VRAM as they have to swap out assets on te fly to prevent running out of memory.
It's difficult to optimize the shader caching manually because it's not always easy to predict in which order the assets should load so most devs don't bother. The way it works was changed from DX11 to DX12 to give developers more control over the shader compiling processes and allow for more software and hardware optimizations but it has completely backfired and MS can't exactly go back and change the spec for DX12 without causing hardware compatibility issues. Some form of automated shader caching has been added to UE5.1 but it remains to be seen if it works as expected.
