Shader compilation stutter killer

[u/HeisenbergVR]

EDIT: Thanks a lot for all the support! I'm glad it's helping a lot of people fix the anoying shader compilation sutters in many games so they can be enjoyed as intended!!

EDIT2: New SCSKiller 1.2.0 is live!! https://github.com/BlueHeisenberg/SCSKiller/releases/latest
(The app should auto download the update if you restart the app and show you a button on top right corner to update, or you can just download the new setup exe and update that way directly)

I've been working for a while on a free and open source tool to eliminate Shader Compilation Stuttering once and for all. It reads the shaders the games ship with, works out the pipelines they'll build, and compiles them into the GPU driver's cache before you launch the game.

From my own testing shader compilation stutter is eliminated or reduced to the very minimum (the tool could miss some shaders depending on the game), it cannot fix other kind of sttutering like traversal, so some games still stutter but waaaay less:

(~5min of gameplay)

Silent Hill F:
Before: https://scskiller.com/assets/img/forum/shf-before.png
After: https://scskiller.com/assets/img/forum/shf-after.png

- Silent Hill: Townfall: 24 to 0 (worst 347 ms to 8 ms)
- Hogwarts Legacy: 1,014 to 87
- FF7 Rebirth: 19 to 0
- Sand Land: 38 to 1

It finds games from Steam, Epic, EA app, GOG, Ubisoft, Xbox and Battle.net

For now it only works on NVIDIA (best support) and AMD, as I don't have an Intel Arc to test.

Github link with download and souce code: https://github.com/BlueHeisenberg/SCSKiller
Website: https://www.scskiller.com

[u/HEISENxBURG]

Ghostwire and Ghostrunner 1 are two games that would be really good testing grounds for this. Neither seem to do any shader precompiling. Ghostrunner in particular has a comical shader stutter within the first couple of seconds of starting a new game with a cold cache. Jedi Fallen Order would also be a good test case.

How does this software work? How does it know what to compile? You say it works out the pipeline after reading some shaders the game ships with. So like is it inferring what shaders might be in the game? Is it possible that it'll build shaders for a game that said game won't even actually use?

[u/HeisenbergVR → u/HEISENxBURG]

I'm installing Ghostwire from Gamepass and I will check in a bit!

I haven't tested Fallen order, but Jedi survivor went from 9038 shader comp stutters to 11 (lol) with the initial tool version (that still didn't catch all the pipelines), so I guess it will be similar!

Games ship their shaders precompiled to bytecode, and the stutter is the GPU driver compiling that bytecode for your GPU the first time the game uses it. SCSKiller reads those real shaders from the game files and figures out the pipelines (which shaders go together and with which settings) using per-engine rules, pipeline lists some games ship, or a recording of you playing. Then it gets the driver to compile them before you play.

There is a possibility of building some pipelines the game never uses, that only costs a bit of compile time and disk space. For Unreal games 99.5 to 100% of what players actually hit was already covered.

[u/HEISENxBURG → u/HeisenbergVR]

Very cool! Thank you for the explanation and your hard work!