Marvel Rivals is launching an 'experimental feature' to help players deal with the game's awful performance and insatiable appetite for RAM

The worst part of Marvel Rivals is its optimisation—loading in can take an age, and I've encountered my fair share of stuttering and even some crashes. The fact that I really enjoy playing this game, spitting whole teams off the edge of the map as Jeff, makes all of that even more frustrating. I'm suffering through the awful optimisation just for the love of the game. So I'm really excited to hear that the devs are trying to fix it with something new: "Switch Shader Compilation Mode."

"To address the memory overload, we're unleashing an experimental feature in Season 2: The Switch Shader Compilation Mode," the patch notes say. "With the Season 2 update, players can activate this feature through the PC launcher."

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This mode will enable a couple of enhancements, including changing the shader compilation process, which will only now run when first entering the game and after a new game version or graphics driver update, hopefully decreasing loading times. Memory usage is also "dramatically reduced, cutting down on severe FPS drops, frozen visuals, and crashes triggered by memory shortages."

I can't even begin to describe how excited I am for this. I'm really hoping that this fixes the issues I've had with stuttering and crashes, because if it doesn't, I don't know how long I'll be able to continue wading through Marvel Rivals games that feel like wet cement.

• This fix does come with a couple of known issues that players implementing it should be aware of: Some materials may render abnormally at first, but then fix themselves after a few frames
• Players may experience a small stutter at the start of matches
• Ironically, for systems with a limited number of CPU threads (six or fewer), using both the Switch Shader Compilation Mode and AMD FSR3 Frame Generation simultaneously may introduce more stutters.

But this is apparently a risk the Marvel Rivals devs say players should be willing to take: "We recommend that players with 16GB of RAM or less, who have experienced significant FPS drops, frozen screens, or frequent crashes in previous seasons, consider activating this experimental feature. And remember, if you encounter any issues after enabling it, our support team stands ready to assist on this quest for an optimal gaming experience."

You can bet that I'll be enabling this new feature as soon as I get the Season 2 update sorted tomorrow. I was going to play a ton of Marvel Rivals anyway, just to experience a couple of Emma Frost choke slams, but it'll be nice to do this with slightly better optimisation.