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Epic Games has added a new PSO pre-cache mechanism in Unreal Engine 5.1 to improve PSO hitches in DX12 games. This new mechanism will attempt to reduce shader compilation delays in future DX12 games (assuming those games support this new mechanism).
More specifically, the new PSO pre-cache mechanism now skips rendering objects if their PSOs aren’t ready yet. The system strives to ensure that the PSO is ready in time for rendering, but it can never guarantee this. When it’s too late, you can now skip object rendering instead of waiting for compilation to finish. This will ultimately reduce the number of delays when compiling shaders.
In addition, Epic has reduced the number of PSOs for pre-caching. Moreover, the team improved the old (manual) PSO caching system. Thus, developers can use it along with the new caching mechanism.
You can find more information about the new PSO pre-caching mechanism here. Here. Please also note that these enhancements are exclusive to Unreal Engine 5.1 and up. In other words, older games won’t be able to take advantage of this.
Either way, this is great news, so let’s hope the developers take advantage of it in their future games!
