Most shaders do not have to be compiled in real-time when you’re playing games, because if they were, you would be faced with rather severe stutters in framerate- like, the entire game stopping until the shader is done rendering for the first time.

With PC games, this is instead done through a graphics API like DirectX, Vulkan, or OpenGL, but the concept is similar. Over on consoles, for instance, basically every shader functionality is programmed into the GPU ahead of time. Interestingly, shaders also come with a few caveats. Some shaders are fairly simple and others are fairly complex, but in either case they’re an integral part of any 3D game you might be playing. Shaders are responsible for a great deal of the lighting and shading that goes into a given 3D scene. Shaders are a little complicated to explain without doing a deep dive into how 3D rendering works, but let’s start with their basic function when it comes to 3D rendering. What are Shaders? A flat shader vs a phong shader. How does shader pre-caching improve performance on Steam Deck?.

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