Why is STALKER 2 compiling shaders every time?

Nov. 20, 2024

You can’t start STALKER 2 without it compiling shaders but why does it do it so often?

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The STALKER 2 compiling shaders message appears every time you launch the game on PC, leaving you to wait until the progress bar fills. It’s especially annoying since there’s no way around it, so what’s going on exactly?

The short answer is when STALKER 2 is compiling shaders, it’s taking a bunch of graphical tricks and turning them into something your PC can use. Shaders are basically fancy maths that can move and change pixels on the screen to create different visual effects, and covers everything from lighting effects to moving plants around as you walk through them. It’s an extra layer on top of basic shapes and lights that makes things look better.

However, to runSTALKER 2smoothly, these things need to be converted into as simple a form as possible, and specifically to your set up - different PC components, GPUs, drivers and so on mean a unique compiling process. Because it can take time, games often choose to do it all at the start, rather than try to compile things on the fly which can cause stuttering and slowdown as everything gets worked out.

So, STALKER 2 compiling shaders at the start is technically making things smoother when you play. Although, admittedly, it isn’t great it’s doing it every single time. It’s more usual to do it once and store the information on your system to avoid endlessly redoing it at every start-up. But, for whatever reason, Heart of Chornobyl isn’t doing that. Yet, at least - hopefully a patch will fix things eventually.

While you wait for shaders to compile, you might want to take a look at some of the availableSTALKER 2 mods.© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

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I’m GamesRadar’s Managing Editor for guides, which means I runGamesRadar’s guides and tips content. I also write reviews, previews and features, largely about horror, action adventure, FPS and open world games. I previously worked on Kotaku, and the Official PlayStation Magazine and website.

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