Hello, I'm trying to speed up my game's loading time since I'm in the phase of testing out the map editor. The shader compilation takes the longest time, so I decided to precompile them for now. I used the effect compiler to compile my shader into one file (I use some kind of a "megashader" - all passes in one big file which #includes all required files, so I only create "one" big shader by calling D3DX10CreateEffectFromFile. I've tried digging around the documentation and google but I only came across a technique in which you precompile you vertex/pixel shaders then use the device with CreatePixel/VertexShader and pass the pointer to the precompiled data. Since I have just one big file in which all shaders are, I have no idea how to get each shader individually, better yet, is there a way I can load the entire ID3D10Effect from that file somehow (so I would end up like using D3DX10CreateEffectFromFile except without the compilation process)? And here is something that has been bothering me for a long time: I have only one technique in my shader for EVERYTHING, and it has around 25 passes now (the passes are not used in the "multipass" kind of a way, they are used for totaly unrelated stuff). Obviously from a design point of view it would be better to have 25 techniques, and multiple passes only if the material requires it. So the question is: does packing all passes into one technique decreases performance?

Thanks for the info on both subjects, I got the shaders to work now!