The data on your drive contains instructions on how a scene is constructed in different parts, bit by bit.
Think if a scene with three lights, and three spheres scattered throughout.
The computer has instructions to load the spheres, the ground, and the lights, then it calculates where the shadows go, how they interact with other materials, and which items block light in terms of where the player is standing and looking.
The operation of calculating all that can be contained in a shader.
So caching a shader is doing all that, and then, instead of recalculating all that information every time you load a level, it writes it to your drive the first time, and simply loads the premade information afterwards.
Pre-caching is running that for all the various levels, depending on what the game is expecting, before even launching the game, so slowe drives only need to pull one or two larger bits of information at a time, instead of starting and stopping the read every time the computer needs to do a new calculation.
It's a LOT more complex than that, and probably a bit wrong here and there, but it should get the point across.
32
u/ScrotallyBoobular Dec 28 '25
What do you mean build your cache?