wtf happened to my performance?!

[Kinetika]

got the game, booted it up, maxed everything out, even RT and played it: game ran very good, 60 fps with some minor stutter. I use an external gpu with a 3080ti in it

the i got a new notification that there were new drivers on nvidia's page and i update.....now the performance tanked, cant ene hit 50 fps, stutters horribly, the GPU is being used like 40-50%....wtf happened? :( thinking about just dl the old drivers again

[Foogley]

new driver deletes shader cache, returnal thinks it doesn't need to recompile shaders. rip.

"You can delete "AppData\Local\Returnal\Steam\Saved\D3DDriverByteCodeBlob" to force it to recompile" - found on reddit

[Kought]

I saw it mentioned that the game only caches shaders on the first time you load the game. If you update drivers, change graphics cards, etc, the shaders would need to be cached again.

You could try deleting the D3DDriverByteCodeBlob file located here:

%localappdata\Returnal\Steam\Saved

That should in theory force the shaders to all recompile now that the file is missing.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/Returnal/comments/113emux/warning_dont_updatedowngrade_your_drivers_after/

[KillStealKing82]

Give the new driver a chance to cache shaders again then performance will be back to normal.

[Kinetika]

Originally posted by Foogley:

new driver deletes shader cache, returnal thinks it doesn't need to recompile shaders. rip.

"You can delete "AppData\Local\Returnal\Steam\Saved\D3DDriverByteCodeBlob" to force it to recompile" - found on reddit

Thanks for the quick reply, i would have never figured that out. I'll try that and see how it goes.

That said, this is a huge issue :O

[Kinetika]

Originally posted by Kought:

I saw it mentioned that the game only caches shaders on the first time you load the game. If you update drivers, change graphics cards, etc, the shaders would need to be cached again.

You could try deleting the D3DDriverByteCodeBlob file located here:

%localappdata\Returnal\Steam\Saved

That should in theory force the shaders to all recompile now that the file is missing.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/Returnal/comments/113emux/warning_dont_updatedowngrade_your_drivers_after/

awesome, thanks for the quick reply. I'll try that, worse case scenario i'll do a clean install of the game or something. This is a pretty awful issue, wtf were those devs smoking?

[Kinetika]

In case anyone encounters the same problem as me, aside from following the suggestions given to me here about the shaders recompilation, while it improved the performance somewhat for me, it was still not close to what it was before. So i decided to download my previous drivers and install them again, and voila! sweet 60fps at max settings + RT

The drivers are:
NVIDIA GEFORCE 30 series, 3080ti Game Ready Drivers ver. 522.25 for windows 10/11