Here's the short version: a free fan-made tool called SCSKiller can wipe out a lot of the shader compilation stutter in PC games that never got fixed, but it can't touch the other kind of stutter, and it can ask a lot of your machine first. That's the verdict from Digital Foundry's Rich Leadbetter in a new video on the Digital Foundry channel, and it's worth knowing before you go shoving it at your whole Steam library.
Digital Foundry has been running its campaign against stutter in PC games for years. The video's description says SCSKiller was inspired by that campaign and built by a DF supporter, BlueHeisenberg, as an "external, brute force approach" to the problem. It's aimed squarely at the huge back catalogue of games that may never get an official fix.
What it actually does
Quick refresher. Shaders are the little programs that tell your GPU how to draw things, and on PC they have to be compiled for your exact graphics card and driver. If a game does that the moment a new effect appears on screen, you get a hitch. PCWorld's explainer puts the blame on PC gaming's greatest strength: every PC is different, so developers can't compile everything ahead of time the way they can on a console.
SCSKiller's trick, as Leadbetter explains it, is to do that compiling before you play. It works through a game's shaders up front, so when the explosion or the cutscene arrives, the work is already done.
Where it shines
The results in DF's testing are the payoff. In Silent Hill f, DF shows a character's arms failing to appear on a cold cache until compilation catches up, and SCSKiller fixes it. In RoboCop: Rogue City, the long freezes on moving between areas go away. Sand Land loses its big spikes the first time an attack effect fires, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth gets smoother camera cuts, cutscenes and first fights.
That's the overlooked bit for a lot of players. Plenty of games that stutter on first play aren't badly made all the way through. They're just compiling at the worst possible moment, and a tool can move that moment.
Where it doesn't
Now the catch, and DF is upfront about it. There are two different stutters in modern PC games, and SCSKiller only fixes one.
Silent Hill: Townfall barely improves, because its hitches are mostly traversal stutter: the game streaming in the world as you move through it. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is DF's other example of a game where streaming, not shaders, is the main problem. Pre-compiling does nothing for that.
Then there's the cost. In Beast of Reincarnation, Leadbetter says the pre-compile took close to an hour on DF's Ryzen 5 5600 test machine and used a lot of extra memory and disk space. It fixed the game's pop-in, but his point is fair: asking players to wait that long just to see the world render properly is too much, and it's the developer's job.
The real fix is coming from the platform
DF's verdict lands in the right place. SCSKiller is an impressive bit of work from one independent developer, and it shows how much better games could be handling this. It also shouldn't be necessary.
The bigger fix is Advanced Shader Delivery, which DF also covers. Microsoft's own DirectX blog says it delivers precompiled shaders when you download a game, and in June it reached general availability in the Xbox PC app for AMD's RDNA graphics cards. PCWorld reported in October that Nvidia's GeForce 621.01 driver added support, starting with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day. The catch there is the same as always: games have to support it, and PCWorld notes it won't fix traversal stutter either.
DF also shows the community going after that other stutter. The Ishimura Patch for Dead Space targets traversal hitches in the remake, and Leadbetter is clearly impressed.
What players are saying
The comments are mostly applause for the tool and frustration at the industry. A lot of viewers are asking why a fan has to do this at all, several ask DF to test traversal-stutter fixes next, and a few warn that cache sizes and memory use can get very large on some games.
Should you use it?
My take: yes, for the right game. If an older PC game stutters every time something new happens on screen and its developer has moved on, SCSKiller is worth a go, as long as you've got the disk space and patience for the first compile. If the hitches come as you move through the world, save yourself the hour. That's traversal stutter, and this isn't the tool for it.
From the creators
Watch the video
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