Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

Hasn't Unreal Engine 5 gotten a bunch of criticism about a lot of the games made with it having high system requirements, and often playing like a stuttery mess? Though it's hard to tell where the technical decisions end and developers not caring much about optimization (or expecting people to use upscaling even for 1080p) starts.

Recently, it was revealed that even the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 benchmarks used upscaling and the problems with visually stunning but horribly performing games like The Forever Winter were also pretty obvious.

I did very much appreciate what Black Mesa did, though. Maybe Project Borealis will also be a success story in due time.

It's complicated. There is Unreal 5 tech that is extremely slow in and of itself (Lumen and Nanite come to mind), but most of the stutter comes from UE5's notorious shader compilation pipeline. Instead of pre-compiling shaders on first launch, UE5 will automatically compile and cache shaders while the user is playing which obviously hits the CPU and causes slowdown in unfamiliar areas.

However, it should be noted that this isn't an issue for consoles (where precompiled shaders come with the game) or Steam Deck (where shaders are compiled via Fossilize before the game is even launched). It's most notable on DirectX programs during the first run, which hits benchmarks quite badly but also becomes less stuttery as more shaders are cached.

What prevents to precompile shaders on windows, in a similar way it's done on those other platforms?

Technically, nothing. It's perfectly possible to precompile shaders on Windows - it's just not convenient or logical for most PC users.

On console, precompiling makes sense because you know exactly what hardware a user will have and you can optimize for one or two sets of hardware. The effort required to automatically package and download these shaders for users on their first load is worth it, so it's a viable fix to shader stutter in games where it crops up.

On Linux, precompiling makes sense because shaders take an extra long time to process due to the DirectX -> Vulkan translation. Since this causes stutter in every game, a precompilation step is pretty much mandatory for everything but conveniently also solves the UE5 stutter issue at it's roots.

On PC, it's basically a maelstrom of worst case scenarios. You don't know what hardware a user will have, so you can't package precompiled shaders. You're not translating shader calls so you have to rely on each version of DirectX's specific DXIL features instead of the unified Vulkan 1.2+ SPIR-V that you get from DXVK. And of course, even if you did get a magic "Compile the Shaders!" program working most users wouldn't bother since they're impatient. Some games try adding optional precompilation screens, but I wager most people just skip them when given the opportunity.

Thank you for the explanation! Honestly, it feels like precompiling all the shaders should be done during loading the assets initially, with the in place option being optional.

I thought that it could be done at install time.