Reducing Shader Compile Time for Unreal Engine Landscape

If you are working on an Unreal Engine project with a landscape, I bet you have to wait for at-least a minute when you change the material.

If you have a Threadripper with 64 cores, may be just skip this article :D

Here, I will show you a neat trick to reduce shader compile time 2–3 times without changing your hardware or software setup.

Watch this video:

About Some Concerns

In this video, I asked you to delete some directories. They are mostly cache directories for your project. Usually, we don’t ship them to GitHub or a source control service.

It’s fine to delete them, but they might introduce some additional shader compile in the next time you start your project.

In my tests, I didn’t have that issue since here’s I’m only deleting the derivedDataCache in the project. There’s another one in your user directory & it will keep all the compiled shaders.

I asked to delete the Intermediate directory as well. This is mostly used when you have some C++ code. May be, you can ignore deleting it. Otherwise, you need to rebuild your project again in the next time.

Give It a Try

This trick really helps me to experiment faster when I am working with OpenLand. This additional time save, allows me to try out new things faster.

But, if you are curious first do this on an example project or take a full backup of your project.