Up until now, Ryujinx has been compiling shaders on the fly when the game requests them, causing FPS drops and stutters lasting anywhere from a split second to nearly a minute, depending on the game and the size of the shader. Once compiled, these shaders remained in RAM only until the emulator was closed. On subsequent replays of the same game those shaders had to be compiled yet again, bringing with them the same slowdowns. While there are driver-level shader cache functions available on Nvidia and AMD GPUs, these only offered minor relief and are invalidated completely from time to time.

Thanks to this clever implementation, the shader cache will rebuild itself on boot if an invalidating event occurs i.e. updating your GPU drivers or if Ryujinx releases an update that affects shader code. This rebuild process takes a few minutes but surely beats having to play the game with stutters again just to build up your cache. Upgrading your PC? No problem! You can even transfer your shader cache files to the new hard drive when it's time; the shaders will be rebuilt for you on the first boot of the associated game.

Download Ryujinx Shaders