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The Last of Us part 1 building shaders issue

The issue is pretty widespread with some users reporting hour of wait times

Updated: Mar 29, 2023 8:51 am
The Last of Us part 1 building shaders issue

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The last of us part 1 building shaders issue: Naughty Dog’s latest entry into the PC space, The Last of Us Part 1, has been bashed by a myriad of games trying to play the game after it has supposedly launched.

Now Read: TLOU part 1 patch: when is the first PC patch coming out?

Gamers have been encountering a “building shaders” bug that has prevented them from starting the game for sometimes hours at a time. But what is causing this building shaders bug in The Last of Us part 1?


What is The Last of Us Part 1 building shaders issue?

When you launch a game for the first time, especially if it’s a big AAA game, you’ll likely encounter a “building shaders” section somewhere before the game officially starts.

The last of us part 1 building shaders

This is completely normal, and the process shouldn’t take more than two or three minutes depending on your PC’s hardware. The process, fairly obviously, starts from 0% and when it reaches 100%, your game should be ready to play.

The issue in The Last of Us Part 1 presents itself in the form of extremely long wait times, some users even report hours of waiting for the shaders to build.

This is a completely abnormal and unacceptable amount of time. Some users are even worried about their ability to refund the game on Steam because they have waited more than 2 hours alone just to load shaders.

If you want to refund your The Last of Us Part 1 copy on Steam, you can follow our guide.


What is causing The Last of Us Part 1 building shaders issue?

It’s hard to tell what might be causing The Last of Us Part 1 shader building issue because we aren’t game developers. In all likelihood, the issue is rooted in poor optimization between the game and your GPU. This is because building shaders is a very GPU-dependent task.

This does not mean that there’s an issue with your hardware, just that the game is poorly optimized. Both good and bad news.

This means that The Last of Us Part 1 shader building issue cannot be fixed or influenced directly by you. It has to be patched out by Naughty Dog. It’s unclear how long the patch will take to be developed, but we hope it’s soon.

What does building shaders mean?

When a game says that it’s “building shaders,” it means that it’s generating shader programs that the graphics card can use to render the game’s visuals. Shaders are small programs that run on the graphics card and are responsible for determining how each pixel in a scene should be rendered.

These shader programs are built by the game engine during the initial loading or when certain parts of the game world are loaded for the first time. The process of building shaders involves compiling and optimizing the shader code to create efficient programs that can be executed quickly by the graphics card.

Building shaders is a necessary process for modern games as they rely heavily on advanced graphical effects like dynamic lighting, shadows, and reflections. These effects require complex shader programs that must be tailored to the specific hardware and capabilities of the player’s graphics card. Therefore, building shaders is crucial to ensure that the game runs smoothly and looks its best on each player’s unique hardware configuration.


Jack is a Tech and News Writer who has a vast and proficient knowledge of CPUs, Motherboards, and Computer technology.

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