The Callisto protocol had a frosty reception in its PC version, mainly because it suffered from a serious problem in compiling its shaders which resulted in constant screen freezes or freezes, which indicated that the system was putting caches these textures on our PC at this precise moment, a task that probably should have been carried out before or without the user noticing. In reality, the solution turned out to be easy. By playing this same segment for the second time, it could be done perfectly, since everything was correctly cached. The initial gaming experience was terrible, but this case was not the only one, and it is not impossible to avoid it, as is the case of Hi-Fi Rush, which is free of stops.
Many channels such as Digital Foundry are championing the score of this problem which has been growing for 2 years, even in the most recent ones dead space. No matter how powerful your PC is, you will experience these downtimes if the texture cache system is not properly optimized by the developer. They even mention that there is a stream of gamers who are starting to turn to console gaming since due to their current graphics streaming systems they don’t suffer from this problem in any way.
Hi-Fi Rush used all the techniques at its disposal to solve it.
In this interesting article published by Gamer on PC, explain how Tango Gameworks managed to solve this root problem in Hi-Fi Rush, although it is another title created with Unreal Engine, susceptible to this error. Kosuke Tanaka, the studio’s graphics programmer, explained to PC Gamer that this issue specifically stems from the “DirectX 12 and Vulkan Static Object (PSO) compiler.” And she continues:
When a game first loads a shader, the GPU drivers start compiling, causing crashes. Developers play the same scene multiple times, so they tend to forget about downtime related to this build. Unreal Engine 4 has a feature that caches these objects (PSO Caching) to prevent this, but that doesn’t cover everything.
Specific, there are certain shader combinations that this system omits, such as those created with Niagara VFX. In Hi-Fi Rush, these dropouts still exist and occur, but they’ve been hidden under certain cutscene transitions, minimizing the issue as much as possible. In Tango they went beyond the default operation of Unreal Engine 4 and analyzed all possible caching issues that may occur in the game and forced them to GPU already loaded them beforehand .
In short, it is the absolute task of the developer to avoid this problem for the players. We don’t know if this issue will be fixed with Unreal Engine 5, if Epic itself will take note to fix it, or if it will be something that PC gamers will have to continue to put up with. At least, we know that if they succeeded in it in Tango, they can also in the rest.
