BOTW Shader Cache Findings - RAMdisk = Huge Caching Speed

I've been testing everything to do with BOTW shader caching today. Here are some things to note:

• By default, accumulating a shader cache will eventually cause BOTW to lock to 15 FPS in 90% of areas, no matter how powerful your CPU is. Deleting it will cause your FPS to return to 30.

You can solve this by enabling these settings in the NVidia Control Panel: http://i.imgur.com/9SLVH6Z.png You also need to run the game with administrator privileges. After you take these steps, your BOTW shader cache can get as large as it wants and your FPS will be unaffected.

• The actual process of BOTW shader caching, ie. the stutters you experience as you encounter new areas and effects therefore new shaders, is accelerated by storing the CEMU folder (which contains the shader cache folder) on a fast storage device. SSD is better than HDD and RAMdisk is way, way, way better than SSD.

I spent a few hours benchmarking shader caching in various forms of RAMdisk. I also tried symbolic-linking the NVIDIA shader cache folder (located in %appdata%) into a separate NTFS RAMdisk (since FAT32 doesn't support symbolic links), which did not cause a speed increase in caching. Oddly it did seem to give an FPS boost in some situations. While doing camera 360s in Korok Forest it appeared to give a significant boost.

Here's my findings. The fastest caching is achieved by creating a small (1gb is ideal, shader cache won't exceed that size) FAT32 IO format RAMdisk. NTFS RAMdisks are, for some reason, slower than my SSD. FAT32 RAMdisks cache shaders about 10x as fast as my SSD. When I walk into a new area I almost don't notice the caching - it's reduced to extremely tiny stutters that don't even drop the vsync from 30fps. I tested 4 different RAMdisk programs, and the fastest, both in disk benchmarks and shader caching, was Primo RAMdisk Ultimate. However, the difference was fairly small.

To be clear, you ONLY need to copy your CEMU folder to the RAMdisk. The game files should remain where they are. If you have 64gb+ of RAM, you could however create a 24GB RAMdisk and put the game files in there too, which would give you insane load times.

Go forth and cache.

Edit: Just spent a couple hours benchmarking, and it turns out that RAMdisk gives a fairly substantial FPS boost as well, at least in some situations.

Loaded 40 times, with 4 different configurations, into a save at the Kakariko staircase which loves to eat frames. Stood perfectly still and watched the framerate. 16-16.5 with everything on SSD, 17-17.5 with either CEMU or the %appdata% NVidia cache folder on RAMdisk (but not both,) 19-19.9 with both CEMU and the NVidia cache on RAMdisk.