If you own an Nvidia GeForce graphics card, you’ll no longer need to wait for games to recompile shaders after a GPU driver update. That’s thanks to the company’s new automatic shader compilation (ASC) tech, which comes part and parcel with the latest Nvidia App beta.
Shader compilation has become an irritating inconvenience for PC gamers, forcing you to wait for ages when you first fire up a new game, and then again whenever you update your GPU driver. You’ll still need to wait for that initial shader compilation when you run a game for the first time, but ASC does at least promise to remove the need for subsequent recompiles following driver updates.
For context, shader caches currently live and die alongside driver installations and game patches. All your compiled shaders disappear once you move to a new version, or even reinstall the one you’re using, requiring a fresh recompile.
With ASC, you can regenerate that cache across driver updates while your system is idle. In theory, this should make waiting for repeat compilations a thing of the past, or at the very least less of a frequent inconvenience.
ASC arrives in the same beta update to the app that introduces DLSS 4.5 frame generation, and it’s in beta at the time of writing and disabled by default. However, you can access ASC via the ‘Global Settings’ tab in the Nvidia app. From there, you can customise how much space you want to allocate to the cache size, as well as how many system resources you’d like to provide the process.
While I still need to test ASC before firmly recommending the feature, I’ll most certainly be trying it out as soon as possible. I like to maintain good GPU driver hygiene, downloading the latest versions as they become available, despite Nvidia’s recent output proving problematic.
It’s the huge list of features like this that draw me, and seemingly most others, to the GeForce series. While DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution is enticing on its own, class-leading upscaling quality is just one of many feathers in Nvidia’s proverbial cap. Shout out to RTX HDR, which doesn’t nearly get enough flowers. Both AMD and Intel would do well to catch up quickly, or better yet, beat their big green rival to the punch.
If you’re looking to upgrade your graphics card, check out our guide to buying the best GPU for your needs.
