2d ago

Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering - IGN

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2d ago

Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering

www.ign.com /articles/borderlands-4-dev-gearbox-asks-pc-gamers-to-wait-15-minutes-for-shaders-to-compile-in-the-background-while-playing-after-reports-indicate-recent-update-causes-stuttering

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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.
Or I can download, install, and start playing literally any other game in less time.
Gearbox, fire your CEO.
- Just replace it by AI
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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Remember how like... 5-10 years ago, games just... Kinda worked?
- 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
- Or when they didn’t have zero day patches because it was a cartridge.
- 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 👀.
- No, I don't remember that at all.
  Some did. Some didn't.
- 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.
- I remember, it was in the lands of make believe and nostalgia I think.
- Isn't 10 - 15 more accurate at this point? I think we're older than we think.
- They did not.
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
- 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.
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).
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.
Yeah, in the 15 minutes it takes to see if changing the setting caused any performance issues, I can easily just boot up Maze Mice and get through roughly 2 rounds with zero complications whatsoever. No need to change any settings from default or wait absurd lengths of time just to play a game without stuttering and other performance issues.
Also, your game is piss poorly optimized if you can't get shader compiling working properly without tanking your experience in game.
- I've played a handful of games that precompile shaders at boot up without it taking 15 minutes, and they try to hide at least some of it behind the splash screens and such. This is absurd. If pre-compilation or caching is needed, just fucking do it.
  On top of what you said, that any company with the funds of Gearbox has no excuse for not being able to optimize it to happen during runtime without tanking FPS.
  
  I don't understand exactly why but they're not storing the computed shaders so you constantly have to redo it. But it also shouldn't be taking that long anyway. It takes the new battlefield maybe 30 seconds to do this, so something weird is going on in the background.
  
  Steam basically does this right, imo.
  When you launch a game, and... your drivers have changed, or there's been a substantial update to the game... it just tells you its compiling shaders before properly launching the game.
  15 full minutes is pretty terrible though.
  I think my worst ever is around 5 to 10, and that is when I am intentionally fucking about with mods and different versions of Proton and changing up Proton/Wine prefixes with new attempts at finding a working Windows component/requirement for some nonsense that by all rights should not work at all, lol.
Why are games so shit nowadays? Besides UE5 slop I mean.
- There are plenty of games made in UE5 that are good, it's just this idiot doesn't know how to use the engine.
So Premium.
Continue to wait 15+ minutes because this was already the case at launch and it still continued to stutter like a drunken frat boy.
tired of this game crashing.
I wait 15min for shader just to get into the menu, then continue, then wait another 5-10min for even more shaders...
play for an hour or so, and then it just crashes out.
Hah, doesn’t have the balls to give them refunds.
- 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.

56 comments