Keep the DirectX Shader Cache

What it changes

Takes the DirectX Shader Cache out of Windows' automatic cleanups, such as Storage Sense and the Disk Cleanup Windows runs on its own when a drive gets low on space.

Why it helps

• Windows keeps the shaders DirectX games compile in a cache (the D3DSCache folder), so they aren't compiled again next time.
• The automatic cleanups count that cache as junk and delete it. After that, every game rebuilds its shaders while you play, with the stutter of a first run.
• Keeping the cache keeps games as smooth on their next start as they were at the end of the last one.

Trade-offs

• The cache is no longer trimmed automatically, so it uses some disk space. It's usually a few GB at most.
• Disk Cleanup still lists DirectX Shader Cache when you run it yourself, so you can clear it by hand if a game's cache ever goes bad, for example after a game update starts crashing on load.

Requires administrator rights. No restart needed.

Details

• Sets Autorun=0 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\D3D Shader Cache. Windows ships it as 1, which lets automatic cleanups empty the cache.
• TrayTrigger records the value it found first and puts exactly that back on Restore Previous.
• Shown as N/A on a copy of Windows that has no DirectX Shader Cache cleanup handler, since then nothing deletes the cache automatically.

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Part of Performance Tweaks. This page is the same text as the app's Learn more button, generated from Help/tweaks/dx_shader_cache.md. To fix something, edit that file (or open an issue); wiki edits are overwritten on the next sync.