I got slow HDD and wonder should I be using NVidia Shader Cache. Most of games I run are older titles that barely use 50% of my GPU/CPU power, yet in many cases I can still notice frame rate drops and skippy frametimes. Should I disable Shader Cache? Also, is it possible to move NVidia Shader Cache to RAMDISK and would it matter?
Yes you should use Shader Cache. SSD/HDD speed doesn't really matter in this case because shaders are compiled once for each application so that they could be just loaded in when you run the application next time. You'll make your GPU work extra and get longer loading times by disabling Shader Cache. As for frame rate drops and skippy frametimes, look elsewhere.
@hemla currently my nv shader cache is located on RAMDisk along with browser cache,downloads etc.I can't tell you that it's faster this way or not but can confirm that it's possible to move it to RAMDisk without worrying about any errors or bsods etc. P.S. Judging by what @RealNC posted about the slow compilation time,relocating it to RamDisk should decrease that time significantly.
as far as I know you can't actually disable Shader Cache compilation, the setting in the control panel only disables the Shader Cache being saved to the HDD, the Shaders Cache is still going to be created and used but this time they are saved to the RAM and later flushed so a RAMdisk is kinda redundant unless you wish to keep the cache forever by making backups before deleting the RAMdisk., this should provide with the fast RAMdisk and eliminate the stutter from shader being created. There is one setting you can access using Nvidia Inspector Profile and the advanced unknown settings that can disable some(but not all) shader compilation under PS_ASYNC_SHADER_SCHELUDER_FLAGS
I understood his post like this: Shader Cache compilation is slow but is only done once per game Shader Cache load is fast and is done every time you start the game
Well, maybe it's confusing to someone who doesn't know how shaders are handled. So: Shaders are loaded by the game like any other of their assets, and sent to the driver for compilation (meaning transformed from source code form into binary form that can be used by the GPU.) The driver compiles them and sends the results back to the game. The compilation happens by the CPU, not the GPU, and is slow. A shader cache doesn't get rid of the loading-from-disk step. It only replaces the compilation step with a second loading step (loading the previously compiled form of the shader from disk and sending that to the game.) Even with a very slow disk, loading small already compiled shader files from said disk is much faster than generating them again. Also, the shader cache is meant to persist between reboots. Putting them on a RAM disk meaning losing the cache on reboot (unless you're syncing the RAM disk to disk on reboot.)
I have used WinPrefetchView and found out that for certain applications, certain nv shader cache files are listed there while others not. Those are listed under application names. Sadly I don't know how to check what SuperFetch stores.
8 messages and already insulting others ? Good job. Not only were they helping the OP to understand, they were also absolutely polite and not attacking you, while at the same time mentioning that your setup is not really useful in getting more performance, but as well risky since you could lose the cache on unexpected reboot or power loss.
In my own flesh and experience i can say, no the shader cache doesn't improve performance in a faster disk.
