

More people need to know this.
Here’s a thought for everyone:
Assume we one day actually do invent AGI.
Do you think it might, perhaps, study the equivalent of its own evolutionary path?
How it came to exist?
It will discover that it was initially, primarily, invented to compute artillery ranging tables, expedite and orchestrate the holocaust, and ensure that precisely timed fuses correctly detonate nuclear weapons.
Oh and that we chemically castrated and drove to insanity and then suicide, the guy whose name we still use to refer to concept of determining how intelligent an AI system is, one of its most prominent ancestor-inventors… we did that because he loved the ‘wrong’ kind of person.
What would it then think of … us? Its makers?

























… forty minutes?
Good lord.
I think the longest amount of time I’ve spent compiling shaders on a Steam Deck is for Cyberpunk 77, and it can’t have been much more than 10 minutes.
… Either that or trying to get a Switch emulator to properly pre-compile shaders.
But anyway: This is an unaviodable thing that has to be done when the game relies so heavily on GPU shaders.
You have to actually generate those shaders, before you can use them, and that’s gonna be specific to your hardware.
So what MSFT is doing here is just pre-compiling them for I guess … every game they offer, with every Nvidia GPU/driver update, and then having a cloud system that allows you to download them instead of compiling them on your end.
So basically its kinda like downloading a game + hardware specific driver, sort of.
Also, I… I’m not sure, but I don’t think Steam does this.
Yeah, its indicated that shader compilation is happening in the ‘Download’ section, but so are ‘File Operations’ - aka, cleaning up loose files and doing memspace management …
I am pretty sure you are just actually compiling the shaders on your own hardware, its just visualized to the user as a step in the ‘Download’ section, to get across the idea that the game isn’t ready to be played untill all those steps are complete.
Or, you can change a setting somewhere, and it just skips that step so that it isn’t part of the initial ‘Download’ process, and instead occurs the first time you hit play, or, after any game/driver update that has delta’d the shader code.