Preparing shaders...

[Falcon]

Why does the game have to prepare the shaders on EVERY SINGLE STARTUP???

Takes ages!

[Deuce]

Ever played Call of Duty? It's even worse...

[weiss]

Originally posted by Falcon:

Why does the game have to prepare the shaders on EVERY SINGLE STARTUP???

Takes ages!

the first time takes a bit, yes. after that is it manageable. detroit become human did this aswell, same like CoD like Deuce said already. ya would sit even longer on the CoD one when you start the game for the first time.

[Shiftle]

I am honestly confused, it prepares shaders on laptop but not my desktop or steam deck.

[sygys]

Same here. I could understand if it does this the first time but why does it have to do this everytime the game is started?

Also on the steamdeck when fsr 2.0 resolution is set to 1.0 the next startup it's back to 0.2 no idea why this game doesnt save ♥♥♥♥ like it should

[50 Cal]

Originally posted by TheDingo8:

I am honestly confused, it prepares shaders on laptop but not my desktop or steam deck.

really? now im pissed im on a laptop,

[BiggieTheDog]

idk why its at 100% cpu usage. I've never seen my cpu temp reach 91c on anything.

[erratic_gamer]

Originally posted by Falcon:

Why does the game have to prepare the shaders on EVERY SINGLE STARTUP???

Takes ages!

it still does it :(

[SnowPyr]

I'm playing on an i7 4770k w/ GTX 1080 and it does this for me too. I timed it, and starting from the seizure warning, it took another 30 seconds for the preparing shaders progress bar to display, and that then took another 90 seconds or so. So in total, it takes over 2 minutes to get to the main menu when starting the game (from an SSD).

[ThreeDeeVision]

Yep, same here. I had to set the game executable to Windows 8 compatibility mode to get past the shader loading without a crash. It does the shader load every time although the subsequent ones don't seem to take quite as long as the initial one.

The game is making my CPU run over 90C so I am not going to play it until they patch this. Being that the game has been out this long and they still haven't fixed it isn't a good sign.

[bobeagle77]

Same. Everytime I launch game I get preparing shaders... :( Not cool!

[Grand]

there is a mod to remove that, idk about the side effect so use it with your own risk.

https://www.nexusmods.com/hogwartslegacy/mods/22

[OldGuy_UK]

Yes i too find the Preparing shaders on every launch does get a bit much, curious why this info is not stored client side to be read from to stop this, only really needs to be done on initial startup and if a change of hardware has been recognised by the software, anyhow I hope they address this in the near future.

[cswiger]

Originally posted by OldGuy_UK:

Yes i too find the Preparing shaders on every launch does get a bit much, curious why this info is not stored client side to be read from to stop this, only really needs to be done on initial startup and if a change of hardware has been recognised by the software, anyhow I hope they address this in the near future.

What you ask for is already in place. Recompiling the shaders happens at a black screen before the warning; it takes several minutes and involves 100% CPU load.

The "Preparing Shaders" screen is the game loading the already compiled shaders and making them ready for use. It should take less than a minute to complete if you are using an SSD. This game has a lot of complex shaders which are used instead of a lot of static textures and particle VFX. If they tried to stream loading the shaders during play instead of preloading them, the game would suffer worse stuttering.

[yogisgoat]

Not buying it. I have 2 blazing fast ssd's and in the time it takes to "prepare" the shaders I can move the entire game from one drive to the other. There's definitely some compiling going on here.

[400g]

SSD doesn't matter. This games precached shaders take up 1 GB, that is loaded in 10 seconds even on HDDs. Putting the full GB in place where it needs to be is what takes so long. (the same is true for loading savegames)

first it's loaded into RAM, for this part a SSD helps a little (not as much though). From there the shaders are getting prepared and send to the gfx card, shader after shader. This is what takes the time.
A lot of games are doing this. Most are just hiding the fact from you. Instead of a comment saying 'preparing shaders' they show a loading screen or some animation or something.

In comparison this game also uses more shaders than other games. Most of my games don't even use 400 MB precached shaders. (the ones i bothered to check)