So apparently CS:Go has an Ubershaders setting?!

[wowfunhappy]

A friend who plays the multiplayer game "Counterstrike: Global Offensive" said that it includes a toggle to enable Ubershaders. Like in Dolphin, this reportedly makes the game more GPU heavy but decreases the number of small stutters.

I've only ever heard of Ubershaders in the context of Dolphin. The Gamecube/Wii's GPU is able to generate new shaders on-the-fly without compilation, so Dolphin has a large GPU shader that can interpret the console's graphics pipeline. But that doesn't make sense in the context of a PC game. So would anyone be able to explain what this is and how it works? I'm curious!

[AnyOldName3]

The non-ubershader path in Dolphin has stutters because it's not especially cheap to switch between shaders on a PC GPU, particularly when you use a new one for the first time, as it needs to be compiled and optimised, which, in some cases, can take a millisecond or two. If you have to switch shaders a lot, it'll give poor performance, and if they've not been used yet, you'll get stutters. Ideally in a PC game, you can predict what shaders you might need during a loading screen and render some dummy geometry with them to an offscreen buffer so the wait happens when the user's waiting anyway, but you can't always, and then there's still the smaller cost of switching shaders when rendering different objects. Having a look at what people say about the CS:GO setting makes it sound like the ubershader path is faster (although it's not clear whether that means less hitching when using a new shader for the first time, better framerate from avoiding switching shaders as often, or both) but not always used because certain GPUs struggle with the more complicated shaders due to driver bugs.