One of the most frustrating aspects of modern PC gaming is how long you can be stuck waiting for a new game to finish compiling its shaders the first time you boot it up. The second most frustrating is having to do that each time you update you graphics card drivers. Nvidia is hoping its new Nvidia App features might make that a thing of the past.
Included in an update that introduces new features for the RTX 50-series of GPUs, Nvidia has introduced a beta version of what it’s calling Auto Shader Compilation. With this enabled, the Nvidia App will dynamically determine when your PC is idle before kicking off shader compilations for your installed games in the background, potentially freeing you from having to wait for the step to complete the next time you actually want to play.
You’re able to set how much space on your drive can be allocated to storing a cache of shader compiles, with more spacing allowing for more pre-compilations to stand at the ready for your most-played games. You can also roughly specify when the process is allowed to kick in, which you should be careful with since shader compilation can be quite CPU-intensive, so having it going while trying to do something else important on your PC at the same time isn’t advisable. Auto Shader Compilation is disabled by default, but you can start utilizing it with the latest version of the Nvidia App.
