[MBCook]

It’s not a problem for the PS/Xbox/Switch. They have known hardware and it can all be recompiled.

But from what I’ve heard it’s often still an issue on PCs (I’m a Mac guy). I’ve seen videos of shader compilation stutters, even in games with a precompilation step that’s supposed to avoid that.

Digital Foundry has covered this many times. The link in a sibling comment to them on Eurogamer is a great place to start.

[talldayo]

Steam works around this by letting users enable shader precompilation in settings. If you want a console-like experience (eg. like Steam Deck) and you don't care so much about storage space, you can toggle it on and eliminate the stutter before booting up. Most people leave this off, which really ruins the experience on shader-heavy engines like UE4.

This is generally an everyone problem, though. If gaming on Mac was caught-up with where Linux is today, there would probably be a few precompilation steps there too. If you wanted to play Fallout 3 on your Android/iPhone device, it's the same story.

[MBCook]

I’ve heard that helps a lot but I know new driver versions/etc can trigger a recompile. And the less common your setup the less likely it’s an issue.

I don’t think it’s an issue on Apple Silicon Macs(not sure) because like the iPhone there is a very tiny list of variables so precompiling is easy.