Latest Steam Client Update Rolls Out Shader Pre-Caching For OpenGL/Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Latest Steam Client Update Rolls Out Shader Pre-Caching For OpenGL/Vulkan

The latest Steam client release on Wednesday rolls out OpenGL and Vulkan shader pre-caching by default...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Shader-Pre-Caching

[andrebrait]

Pardon me the ignorance, what's different between Direct3D and OpenGL that makes this seems a non-issue on Windows? Os is it more related to the OS/drivers rather than the API?

[FireBurn]

As a habitual git user (updated usually at least once a day) I'm probably best just disabling all of the shader cache, as its guaranteed the Mesa version will change between runs anyway

[boxie]

Pardon me the ignorance, what's different between Direct3D and OpenGL that makes this seems a non-issue on Windows? Os is it more related to the OS/drivers rather than the API?

D3D has a shader cache too. You just don't hear about it hear because D3D is a windows tech and this is a Linux/OSS focused site

[cen1]

Shaders in D3D are precompiled afaik.

[nanonyme]

I wonder if there could be something compatible enough on NIR level before the more driver-specific optimization layers

[andrebrait]

Shaders in D3D are precompiled afaik.

If i understood what I've read, it's compiled to a bytecode. I guess the closest thing we have in OpenGL and Vulkan would be SPIR-V/NIR, right?

[cen1]

If i understood what I've read, it's compiled to a bytecode. I guess the closest thing we have in OpenGL and Vulkan would be SPIR-V/NIR, right?

Something like that. I believe it basically boils down to this:
OpenGL: compile on the fly, each driver can do their own optimizations as they see fit, slower load times
D3D: ship compiled, less optimized, faster load times

[Masush5]

Shaders in D3D are precompiled afaik.

Precompiled to byte code, but they still need to be compiled to the gpu isa the user is actually running. Processing byte code is a bit faster compared to human readable glsl, though, and windows drivers have had shader caches for ages, i assume.

[M@GOid]

Well, based on my first loading of Deux Ex:MD on Windows these days (to compare performance with Linux), shader compilation is a thing on Windows too, or that first loading would not be so slow.