Fossilize VS UnrealEngine

Note : AMD Propietary drivers for Vulkan on both Windows and Linux will have S E V E R E stuttering issues in game without fossilize shader precompilation. This is due to the lack of GPL support

Doesn't make a difference in download size at all, you don't download mesa shader caches (unless on Steam Deck, maybe), you download fossilize archives that are then compiled by the driver on your local machine. It will only affect the disk usage after it's compiled.

You're not the first to complain about fossilze (steam's shader precaching) freezing the system when processing, though I don't know why it would happen really to only some people - it must be some disk io or CPU scheduler shenanigans going on, since as you said, the GPU isn't really involved while compiling shaders.

Right, but this is part of Steam’s overall shader pre-caching system. From what I can tell when this window appears Steam is invoking their Fossilize library to do some work, possibly converting the cache from an intermediary representation to a usable binary for your hardware. I’m not sure why it only appears for some games, maybe it has to do with what graphics API the game is actually using and how the translation layer handles this. There is some discussion here but I couldn’t find official documentation (other than what’s in the Fossilize repository).

On Linux for the first run the game will precompile shaders thanks to this tool Valve made and open sourced. As a result we don't get shader stutter over here anymore.

These people seem to have the problem: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Fossilize/issues/210

What the user below pointed out. Valve specifically uses a library called Fossilize (Open Source on GitHub here https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Fossilize) to generate the shader caches on your Steam Deck (or any machine running Proton).

Fossilize will only be helpful if it actually crashes while compiling pipelines, which I see no indication of in the bt, but still might happen I guess. Also it has some limitation with rt pipelines at the moment: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Fossilize/issues/209 but still worth a try.

Almost all Steam games on Linux do this, it's really nice. Fossilize is an open source Linux tool made by Valve that precompiles Vulkan shaders. This only works with Vulkan though, so its use on Windows is limited, but basically everything on Linux runs through Vulkan, even DirectX games via DXVK.

Visual Studio has a related annoying habit when navigating the call stack (the caller's scope is considered closed if the callee is syntactically its tail) so I wonder whether this workaround would be useful for it as well.

See also this comment in the Unreal Engine code about putting a nop in before as well: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/26677ca1b3c97...

    // Q: Why is there a __nop() before __debugbreak()?

> you can still use it with smart pointers provided by any other library

Is the point of having a kitchen-sink library like this not that you dont have to reach for a 3rdparty library for things that you need 'all the time'?

Certainly, not everyone needs it.

...but, not everyone needs threads either. Not everyone needs an http server; and yet, if you have an application framework that provides them, when you do need them, it saves you reaching for yet-another-dependency.

Was that no the point from the beginning?

unique_ptr is a fundamental primitive for many, as you see from some other frameworks (1), and implementation is not always either a) trivial, or b) as simple as 'just use std::unique_ptr'.

This does seem like a very opinionated decision with reasonably unclear justification.

[1] - eg. https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/release/Engin..., https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL/blob/master/include/...

It is not publicly available. If you click on this link you get a 404 page: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine You actually have to go and subscribe, agree to their terms, and then you get to view the source code. It happens to be free, but it is by no means "public".

https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/tree/5.2.0-preview-2 For anyone wondering

Like I said before, you have the fixed code here (commit: 23937975).

Before you can access the repository at https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine, you must: be an Unreal Engine subscriber. have a GitHub account. have associated your GitHub account with your Unreal Engine account as described on the UE4 on GitHub page.

What you need to do is follow this link and diff my file with Epic's file. You can grab settings that I have from mine and plop them into a custom one for yours. Just be mindful if you're developing in VR for what settings you bring over.

Originally it was going to be NetworkPrediction (need to be signed into a github account with Unreal Engine access for that link to work), but since David Ratti left Epic that died and they stopped working on it. (I didn't know it was dead, that was the CMC replacement I was referring to)

Found this while looking through UE commits