Fair, but there is also the asymmetry of forbidding employees from discussing their salaries or delving into the business' financials.

If it is labor for hire, then an efficient market demands every player access to data to determine price.

If not, the market must account for this asymmetry through regulation and law, and watch business whine like babies when the shoe is on the other foot.

Yeah well, we can't all be a person who doesn't understand how things work. Kudos to you for being simple minded!

" The Kathmandu Post"

Ah we don't to pay for journalism, says a planet of suckers

Oh, that's pretty neat. Microsoft is definitely the right level to address this at - they already have permission to enumerate the HW, own the hardware and software infra to tackle this, enjoy economy of scale other players are not privvy too, and can deliver a solution in a vendor agnostic way. Thanks for the heads up. It's the right thing to happen.

Of course there are. Tragedy of the commons. My point is that no single entity is likely to absorb the costs unless they're already enjoying economy of scale advantages and there are business experience/optic benefits to doing so. The poster above you pointed out that Microsoft seems to be addressing this, which makes a lot more sense to me than doing it at the 3d HW vendor level.

Sure, but many people would opt in, especially if you explained that they would benefit.

Maybe. Maybe not. Before committing to developing such a thing, you'd have to at least do some research and analysis to find out if that's true and how the likely opt in/out ratios would impact the business case. Remember, this is hosting content in a daemon on your machine .. I think that'd a non-starter for a lot of people, despite the upside of shorter shader updates. (I'm not super up on what the US ISP market/landscape is like these days, but are not data caps still a thing on many plans there? I get the sense that hosting off a home line is not only a performance concern but a concern with actual possible financial ramifications.)

It can't be only when the game is open - this is when gamers are most sensitive to their computers doing other work, and the available of such a network would be far more limited.

Also a torrent like network would be absolute loaded with cache misses. You need to fetch a shader from somebody who has the exact same hardware/drive/game version combination as you do, and they need to have opted in. I highly suspect the majority case for many would be to cache miss and end up compiling locally.

Asking people to host and serve a non-trivial amount of content to other players is a non-starter. (The size of compiling all the shaders for CoD can range from a couple gigs to 10 gigs.) Opting in to a torrent-like network would have to be opt in - many people would just opt out (justifiably or not) minimizing the point of such a network.

You can probably assume that if you've thought of something, they've thought of it too. They simply have constraints and considerations - both technical and business oriented - you don't need or want to account for.

It's worth noting that many game studios/engines do support shared shader caches in their local studio pipelines, but the hardware config spread is much more limited, and the costs for lost productivity waiting for shaders is far greater than hosting a shader cache on premises.

Yes, this. There are many *many* combinations. Distributed compilation and a remotely hosted shader cache would cost a lot of money to host. I don't think it's the technical considerations that are as preventative as simply the cost of hosting the service.

Particularly for PvP competitive games that require constant FPS (think CoD, Battlefield, Fortnite, etc) runtime shader compilation is a nonstarter. CoD won't even let you matchmake without compiled shaders, even tho the engine supports compiling them on demand.

"a dummy load"

hey, we found the perfect volounteer

"how to be triggered by the tiniest shit" - welcome to geekmux's TED talk

for the illegal tariffs to be struck down.

Expecting any manner of consistency or (hold back the laughter) leadership (remember when that was the buzz from the management class?) is like wishing for for ponies. I'd settle for boring competency at this point, but here we are.

Annnd since no one seems to have a five point plan to improve things (or at least try something new), we'll keep on this trajectory until we go over the cliff or die waiting for cosmic justice.