Fletcher Dunn: ‘If you: (a) Have an NVidia video card, (b) Have non-ASCII characters in your Windows username, (c) Have really long loading times or big in-game hitches – Try updating your graphics driver. They fixed a bug related to shader caching that had significant perf impacts for CS.’
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There are typically [128 ASCII characters](https://www.ime.usp.br/~pf/algorithms/appendices/ascii.html) in the ASCII character set.
Typical [non-ASCII characters](https://www.seozoom.com/non-ascii-characters-special-characters/) are:
* **Letters with Accents and Diacritics**. Such as the “è” in French, the “ñ” in Spanish, the “ö” in German, and the “ç” in Portuguese and French.
* **Non-Latin Alphabets**. Such as Cyrillic “ж” or “б” characters, Greek “α” or “β” characters, and Arabic “ح” or “ص” characters.
* **Extended Mathematical Symbols**. Such as the infinity “∞”, the integral symbol “∫”, and the summation symbol “∑”.
* **Technical and Scientific Symbols**. Such as the Ohm symbol “Ω,” the degree symbol “°,” and the micro symbol “µ.”
* **Ideographic Characters**. Such as Chinese characters “汉” or “字”, Japanese characters “か” or “な”, and Korean characters “한” or “글”.
* **Emoji symbols**. Such as the smilies “😊” or “😢”, and other symbols such as “👍” or “🎉”.
This must have been one of the weirdest bugs to track.
I’m gonna guess this bug disproportionately affected non-English speaking countries. I wonder how common it was.
How are casual players ever supposed to get the game running properly when it produces bugs like this
Now thats a wierd bug
I’m guessing this means if you have all of the above, not just one?
which version ? 560.70 ?
Keep in mind that unless they hotfixed this, there is a bug with latest nvidia drivers where you don’t see your max refresh rate if you are on non native resolutions.
What’s the driver version?
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It is shocking how prevalent disastrous bugs and exploits are when literally any program tries to parse non-ASCII text. I’ve played games a long time and I swear its every few months that I see some sort of bug or exploit triggered by simply inputting atypical characters in usernames/chats/file names. One of the more recent ones was League of Legends dropping every player that saw a chat message ingame that contained non-ASCII characters.
It begs the question of truly where the problem lies, maybe its never really been the games’ fault and the problem exists within the driver and OS?
Fucking hell, it’s 2024, and Unicode claimed another victim, after all those years!
My wild guess is, they used an older Ansi API instead of it’s WideChar counterpart.
Wonder how your windows username is causing issues in game.
Maybe some function that returns some path under the user’s home folder to access temp/local files (typically C:\Users\<Windows username>\AppData\Local\Temp or something like that) wasn’t handling Unicode characters properly (or the caller of that function) and, as a result, some cached shaders couldn’t be located in order to be reused and were ending up being recompiled every time? Something like that would be my 2 cents guess based on these bullets.