Shader caches

This page contains Shader Cache sets to download for specific games

A shader cache is a collection of GPU specific programs known as shaders that get stored in your computer's auxiliary memory for quick retrieval (as you play your game).

Modern consoles and their games make heavy use of precompiled shaders specific to their GPUs, and these shaders can't be run natively on PC hardware, so they need to be translated or recompiled. The simplest way to do this is to recompile them at runtime, but that's slow and can cause stuttering every time a new shader is loaded in the game. A mitigation to this stuttering is to compile the shaders asynchronously to the emulator, but this has its own drawback in that in the time it takes to compile the shader, the effect in-game that relies on it won't be shown.

Another approach is to cache the system's raw shader pipeline and then compile the shaders before the game even starts. The only drawback here is that someone has to play through the game atleast once to 'build' a cache that can be used by others. This page provides files to pre-built caches for seamless use while playing your games.

When an emulator updates the way it handles shaders, it may break compatibility with previous shader caches; for this reason, the shader version is listed below.

Note: Please compress your shader caches with 7-Zip or WinRAR before uploading them.

Erm...what the sigma?