Shader caches - Emulation General Wiki (2024)

This page contains Shader Cache sets to download for specific games

A shader cache is a collection of GPU specific programs known as shaders that get stored in your computer's auxiliary memory for quick retrieval (as you play your game).

Modern consoles and their games make heavy use of precompiled shaders specific to their GPUs, and these shaders can't be run natively on PC hardware, so they need to be translated or recompiled. The simplest way to do this is to recompile them at runtime, but that's slow and can cause stuttering every time a new shader is loaded in the game. A mitigation to this stuttering is to compile the shaders asynchronously to the emulator, but this has its own drawback in that in the time it takes to compile the shader, the effect in-game that relies on it won't be shown.

Another approach is to cache the system's raw shader pipeline and then compile the shaders before the game even starts. The only drawback here is that someone has to play through the game atleast once to 'build' a cache that can be used by others. This page provides files to pre-built caches for seamless use while playing your games.

When an emulator updates the way it handles shaders, it may break compatibility with previous shader caches; for this reason, the shader version is listed below.

Note: Please compress your shader caches with 7-Zip or WinRAR before uploading them.

Cemu[edit]

Put files in <cemuFolder>\shaderCache\transferable\

Newer versions of Cemu leverage Vulkan 1.2 and asynchronous shaders in a way that it may be preferable on modern GPUs to use async shaders instead of a shader cache, so try enabling that before hunting for shader caches.The current shader version is 150, but Cemu is backward-compatible from version 149 (Cemu version 1.7.0, 2017/05/16)Cemu 1.25.0+ is not backward-compatible with any prior transferable cache.

RPCS3[edit]

Put the raw and pipeline folders in <RPCS3Folder>\cache\<gameSerial>\ppu-<hash>-EBOOT.BIN\shaders_cache\

Current shader version is v1.94 (2022/12/11)^[1]

Xenia[edit]

Put the files in <XeniaFolder>\cache\shaders\shareable

Current shader version is 20220720^[2]

Citra[edit]

Put files in <user>\shaders\opengl\transferable\

Current shader version is 1 (2019/09/07)^[3]

Ryujinx[edit]

Right click the game in Ryujinx's game list, Cache Management > Open Shader Cache Directory, and extract the zip there.

To share: Right click the game in Ryujinx's game list, Cache Management > Open Shader Cache Directory and zip all the files named "guest" and "shared". Use the title ID as filename (check the file path for a folder with a name that resembles 010015100b514000).

• Don't upload shaders if you used mods.
• Vendors seem to matter, so if your card is AMD and there's only an NVIDIA shader cache available, add another entry, and vice-versa. Don't just replace caches from different vendors.

Current shader version is 1.1 (2023/10/23)^[4]

Dump from defunct RyuSAK servers. Have in mind that some shaders might be broken (such as Mario Kart 8).

Avoid re-uploading these shaders to the list above.

• Download Part 1

• Download Part 2

Yuzu[edit]

NOTE: Yuzu is no longer being maintained and shutdown their services (including all repositories) because of legal troubles.

Right click the game in Yuzu's game list and click Open Transferable Pipeline Cache and copy/paste the .bin file.

Current shader version is 11 (2024/1/27). Use version 1659 and below to get shader version 10^[5]

References[edit]