And people who do teardowns are also not the same people who do design. It's easy to look intelligent criticising something while taking it apart.

Now back in the real world Teslas (despite what I think of their build quality) have demonstrated to be some of the most reliable long term battery platforms on the market with literally countless Teslas these days happily driving along at almost peak performance with a milage well beyond what many cars would be scrapped at.

You're ignorant. Maybe you're working on that. But do so without fueling your ignorance with stupid videos.

That would add the requirement for the central repository as infrastructure which is probably not worth it bandwidth/storage-wise when so many gaming PCs are likely to be online at any time, but the possibility of a malware vector (or some kind of sabotage, maybe people would try to DoS a game by sharing corrupted compiled shaders as a form of protest) is worth considering with or without it.

BOINC protects against errors or sabotage in their distributed computing system by having 2 random different users both run the same task and ensuring that the results from both match before accepting the result. This requires centralized infrastructure, but a duplicated work verification system like this could work. Imagine the centralized system acts as a trusted private torrent tracker, only verifying a shader and making it publicly accessible once multiple uploads match. That would make uploading invalid shaders almost impossible since a group would need to conspire to do it with exclusive earliest-possible access to the game/driver/hardware combo.

Those aren't reasons for everyone to be compiling on their own. In a BitTorrent-like system nobody would be "keeping" shaders they aren't using, just sharing shaders they've compiled because they're using them. If nobody's ever done it before for the hardware/driver combination then you fall back to compilation and then share your results so others can benefit and the same work doesn't have to be done again.

Plus most users are probably on one of the latest driver versions so there would be far more hardware than driver variation.

Used? Why stop? Others and I still use mutt!

Just like how WaPo eventually went from an assurance that nothing would change to blocking an endorsement of Kamala Harris to no longer publishing any opinions that were insufficiently pro-"free market" for Bezos' taste:

https://www.ms.now/opinion/msn...

On a related note I thought the idea of an IT staffer having time to play CoD at work was a laughably retro idea. In the post-pandemic era anyone who still has an IT job is being worked to the bone.

You know what, you may actually be right and we can thank AI for that. There was this (previously considered to be) fantasy that people would install Linux rather than just buying a compatible PC. But with PC prices rising the way they are now the combination of timing with the AI bubble may be enough to push some people to take the plunge. I sure as heck am recommending everyone *not* to upgrade their computers right now.

I should also add, shader pre-compilation happens once per driver update per game and for most games is int he order of 500MB to 1GB. I think if you downloaded every game on Steam (to the capacity limit of your SSD) and ran every new driver (you don't have to update GPU drivers) ever released, and precompiled every shader possible you'll never be able to wear out an SSD, at least not before some other part of your PC breaks over the coming decade+. It's just not a big load for your drive.

Maybe ask yourself why that is before you make your preference. While asking yourself why not look up the SMART parameters for your drive. I also do video editing. The now 7 year old SSD I thrash with DaVinci has 97% remaining life (and that's a QVO drive, well known for having the shortest life expectancy rating of all of Samsung's lineup). My 5 year old 980 Pro drive I use for gaming has 100% remaining life.

You won't wear out your SSD. Not with video editing, not with pre-compiling shaders. To think otherwise is just a case of not understanding SSD life expectancy. Maybe if you're using you SSD as a cache for a heavily loaded database server you may find yourself wearing it out after half a decade. Beyond that you simply will not wear out your SSD with any workload you can conceivably throw at it on your PC. Wearing out an SSD is the stuff of servers, thrashing their drives continuously 24/7

Except maybe mining on the Chia network, but I refuse to think anyone on Slashdot is dumb enough to do that.

Tell us you don't know what you're talking about without telling us.

Except that's literally the status quo now. Every driver update requires shader recompilation. By the way this process for most games can be skipped or happens in the background, but results in performance problems.

Also not sure what you mean by half an hour. The longest I've ever seen shader recompilation was about 10minutes, and that was on an absolute potato of a computer.

Yes there is, it's hardware and driver version dependent. It's far more efficient to just do the compilation in the background than to keep a precompiled version for each game for each combination of hardware and driver, x2 once for Vulkan and once for DirectX for games which support both.

For consistent platforms there is already a pre-compiled shader available. E.g. Steamdeck will download precompiled shaders, providing you aren't running a beta version of Proton or an unofficial GPU driver.

Yes and no. Steam does that only for Vulkan games, only for select hardware, and only for select drivers. Shaders are hardware *AND DRIVER VERSION* dependent. Works perfectly fine on something like the Steamdeck, but doesn't work if your choice of driver or hardware doesn't align with whatever Steam is doing, and doesn't help you at all if you don't have Steam always running, i.e. you update your drivers and a day later start Steam to play a game, well there was no time to pre-compile shader cache.

Also background shader pre-caching is disabled by default.

Are you talking about Vulkan? Because DirectX has quite a few features Vulkan doesn't, and is generally considered easier to code with and providing a more consistent framerate with less stutter (though slightly lower framerate overall).

Oh sorry. You were not actually ignorant just trying to poke fun at Microsoft. Hahahah. Yeah good one.

Well no more than usual. The problem is that he couldn't even stick to a simple message. About half the speech was about how the war is ending and they're bringing peace and the other half the speech was about killing every single person in Iran.

I found out that the reason Joe Biden looked so rough is because he stutters and when you saw him doing those long pauses that was him having to pause to get his stutter under control before he spoke. In his old age it came back after he had gotten it under control for a long time.

So all that crap about sleepy Joe was literally just a man with a mild speech impediment struggling with it. Of course none of that was reported by the news media...

Meanwhile Trump was talking about a bill he wanted to pass and mid sentence started to talk about a imaginary person named Bill. This is a real thing that happened. Never mind the bizarre post he just made about Jasmine Crockett being related to Davy Crockett.