>>723353294
>what even are shaders?
Shaders are small programs that run on your GPU. They take inputs (like lighting, textures, or positions) and produce outputs, usually colors and pixels
Shaders can do all kinds of shit, like applying visual effects like black-and-white filters to simulating explosions etc. Ghost of Tsushima grass was a shader.
Because GPUs are designed to run thousands of these tiny programs in parallel, shaders are really fast. devs use them to handle a lot of visual work instead of loading and animating gigabytes of assets.
>and why do you need to load them in some PC games?
they have to be compiled for your specific hardware and drivers which turns them into machine code optimized for your specific GPU setup.
On consoles this happens ahead of time because every console of the same model has identical hardware.