DirectX Shader Cache Sizing and NVMe SSD Queue Depth Saturation: Advanced Implementation and Real-World Architecture

[Avery Bell]

I’ve been benchmarking shader cache behavior on my NVMe setup and hitting some weird latency spikes that don’t correlate with raw sequential throughput. My concern is random 4K low-queue-depth reads saturating the controller queue during shader compilation stutters in competitive titles. For those running custom shader cache sizes in the registry, what threshold did you find before diminishing returns kicked in around 50GB versus 100GB? Більше importantly, does anyone have real data on queue depth 1 versus queue depth 32 latency differences when the cache is actively being written during a live session?

On the decompression pipeline side, I’m seeing GPU stall cycles that seem tied to how fast the compression stream can be consumed versus the storage submission rate. Does anyone here have benchmarks isolating shader decompression throughput against different NVMe controllers—specifically comparing DRAM-less drives versus those with dedicated cache when handling compressed shader blobs? And for the engine-level folks, have you experimented with pre-warming the cache in the title bootstrap to flatten those initial stutter spikes, or does the OS read-ahead just get in the way? Would love to see actual numbers, not just anecdotes.

"Toronto, ON (Canada) • i7-14700K & RTX 4070 Super"

[Sebastian Davis]

Here’s my take after benchmarking this across a few rigs. The shader cache is essentially Windows pre-baking your compiled HLSL so the GPU driver doesn’t pay recompile penalties mid-frame, so sizing it wrong directly hurts your 1% lows. For a competitive setup, I cap it manually rather than letting Windows balloon it—set MaxShaderCacheSize (DWORD, in MB) under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Configuration to around 15360–30720 depending on your library. Anything above ~30GB gives diminishing returns for most titles and just wastes

"Mousepad Rotation: Artisan Zero Soft XL, Hayate Otsu Mid, Vaxee PA"

[Author]

Posts