Except that formats change between driver versions, among other things. I know of few games that aggregate their shaders, most just generate them during loading. There's a good chance you'd uncover some amusing bugs.
we are talking about caching TEV configuration, not compiled shaders.
They were against this solution for ~3 years, how much coverage would they get in 3 years of users uploading missing Unique ID" objects?
The UID's are a dolphin invention, though, on the hardware level there are just a bunch of registers set. So either you store a complete dump of the cpu state for each shader configuration or you invalidate all shared shaders when dolphin internals change.
Yes, and the parent comments are talking about a way to make it possible to compile all the shaders on startup instead of in the middle of the game. Longer loading times > stuttering.
