Season Start Preload Shader program

I wanted to drop a suggestion related to load time issues that alot of people have !!!"ESPECIALLY"!!! on new season launches when the old shaders get removed.

I am many other people on this game have huge load screen issues with this game due to shaders, sometimes sitting on a load screen for up to 5 minutes. Other that the load screen times most of us have no problem running the game full tilt.

It would be nice if a option was introduced into the game that allowed you to preload all shaders required to play the entirety of the game all at once.

Basically a shader installation process that starts and does not stop until all shaders have been loaded and processed.

The worst thing about a new season in my opinion is the extreme lag and load times of a fresh new season going live, it would be very nice if a bit of that could be midagated preseason start so everyones game can run smoothly.

Just for the record also its not just about the power of my computer, I know plenty of people with monster computers that have the same shader cache loading issue at the beginning of the season, perhaps its not as severe but it is noticable even on very powerful machines.

Thanks, please do consider adding a preshader option to the game so people can click preload shaders and walk away and come back to a fully functional game and not a constant load screen nightmare.

It may seem like a good idea BUT it wouldn't work, if you tried to fix stuttering at some point by giving nvidia a larger shader cache (100gb or infinite) then it is likely why you are taking so long to load (the shader files are only a few MB each and you are likely trying to load hundreds to thousands of them)

Yeah +1

If they can't fix the shaders at least let people load them instead of having to sit there in a zone for 5 minutes waiting for the green bar to not be full.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

Yeah +1

If they can't fix the shaders at least let people load them instead of having to sit there in a zone for 5 minutes waiting for the green bar to not be full.

If a slower PC already needs 5 minutes to load only the shaders and assets actually required for a single area, then preloading all shaders and assets at startup isn't solving the problem, it's just moving the exact same workload to an earlier point and making it larger. Instead of waiting in a zone, you'd be sitting at launch for significantly longer before even getting into the game, assuming your system even has enough headroom to attempt keeping everything prepared upfront in the first place.

And realistically, weaker or older hardware wouldn't suddenly cope better with that load. Systems already close to their limits with only the required shaders and assets for one instance would start struggling much harder if you force everything to stay resident all the time. All MTX assets, effect assets, encounter assets, environment assets and shader variants, even for content you never actually see in that session, would still occupy memory and preparation time simply because they were loaded upfront.

That isn't optimization. That's turning selective workload into permanent overhead and paying for content whether the game ever needs it or not.

There is also a reason games often do larger shader compilation passes after patches or driver changes. Shaders and caches get rebuilt, updated or prepared so future gameplay can reuse that work instead of recompiling everything repeatedly. After that, entering an instance is usually not "load literally everything", it's your PC preparing and pulling in the shaders and assets relevant for that content while relying on caches where possible. That's already the optimized approach, load what is required, don't waste resources on what isn't.

And it's not just a matter of "load everything and it's fine". Think of RAM and VRAM like seats in a car. Once the seats are occupied, there isn't magically room for more passengers. You either wait, reshuffle, or start pushing things out to make space. Loading everything upfront doesn't remove hardware limits, it just reaches them sooner. In practice that usually means more memory pressure, more waiting, more stutters and less stability.

Long loading screens also usually aren't some abstract transition of your character travelling from point A to point B. Most of the time they're your PC doing actual work, unloading what is no longer needed, loading assets, preparing shaders, reading data, rebuilding caches and setting up rendering for the next instance. If that process takes 5 minutes while only loading the content relevant to that instance, that usually points more toward the system taking a long time to process that workload than the loading strategy itself being fundamentally wrong.

Games absolutely should keep improving and optimizing, and developers already spend a lot of time reducing overhead, improving caching, streaming and loading behaviour. But there is a point where software cannot fully compensate for hardware limitations. If a machine already struggles loading only what is necessary, asking it to load even more data upfront won't make it faster, it usually just creates more pressure and longer waits.

This also isn't a PoE specific thing. Modern games generally avoid loading every possible shader variant and asset upfront because doing so massively increases startup cost and memory usage for content that may never even appear. The optimized approach is usually to load and prepare what is actually needed, not everything that could theoretically exist.

So the idea sounds intuitive at first, but in practice it's one of those cases where the proposed fix would make the exact issue worse rather than better.