Managing Unbounded Growth: A Story of Shaders in UE | Unreal Fest Stockholm 2025

In this session recorded at Unreal Fest Stockholm, we explore the journey Unreal Engine has been on when it comes to managing large numbers of shaders and long compilation times.

We begin with an overview of the numerous facets of this problem, and an explanation of how they coalesce to make the lives of rendering engineers and content creators difficult.

From there, we deep dive into all of the recent and not-quite-so-recent improvements in this area, using the City Sample as a case study to see the impact of all these changes in a practical example.

Finally, we provide an overview of the next steps in this space, with a peek at various additional engine-level improvements we hope to tackle over the next few versions that will continue to alleviate some of these issues systematically.

You’ll gain an understanding of the various components of the UE shader system, how they fit together, and all of the recent changes that were introduced to minimize shader compilation and cook time overhead.

In addition, you’ll learn details about all of the ways both content (materials, material instances) and explicit shader/engine code can contribute to this unbounded growth, arming you with strategies to deal with the problem at the project level.

Learn more about Unreal Engine here: unrealengine.com

#Shaders, #ShaderCompilation, #CitySample, #UnrealEngine, #UE5, #UnrealFestStockholm