Clearing cache: What does it do?

[pauldacheez]

Dolphin no longer shows the "Clearing block cache" or "Clearing JIT cache" messages, and these two specific caches are only held in RAM so they're not user-clearable (except in debug mode, which slows everything down anyway, IIRC), so you can ignore those two. The only two caches you can touch are the game list cache, which simply caches the name/banner/info of all your games, and the shader cache, which is full of shaders your GPU has already compiled that Dolphin dumps so that it doesn't have to ask to recompile them later on. You should only need to clear these if they're causing issues (e.g. stuff's corrupt in your game list or loading your game list crashes Dolphin, you get pixel shader errors or random crashes in games), since wiping them will only make your game list take longer to load and cause stutters whenever your GPU drivers have to compile new shaders.