How is this acceptable? (compiling 8000+ shaders on a brand new installation)

[S-ed]

switch between forward / deferred rendering (temporarily)

If you switch it back it won’t start compilation again.

Engine generally warns you about this stuff:

I’m not sure why many people here having issues with compilation of shaders. It is a lot of shaders, but it rarely takes more than a hour to compile. Even 30000 shaders. PCIe SSD + 16-32 threads CPU is a must for non mobile Unreal project.

Also disable all the options that increasing the number of permutations. Especially stuff like Quixel Master Materials.

Understanding Shader Permutations

Article written by Matt O. In this article, we’ll cover at a high-level what shader permutations are, how they happen, the performance issues they create both at runtime and compile time, and potential remedies. Covered in more detail in How the Unreal Engine Translates a Material Graph to HLSL, the Unreal Engine will compile a material graph down to a program in the High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) for a target platform (DirectX SM5, Android GLES 3.1, Metal, etc.). These programs still cont…