Unwanted playback delay before playing animation issue

Hi guys

I’m working on some simple motion graphics in Blender. I’ve multiple scenes in my file with some deforming planes and animated curves all with simple flat emission shaders.

Often when I press play or shift-space, it takes 3 to 4 seconds for the animation to start playing. Once it plays, everything is fine. This happens about 70% of the time. It doesn’t happen when I play and pause in a short time frame. I guess it’s some sort of caching issue?

Anyone experienced this before?

Intel i7-11800H + RTX A2000 Laptop ; Blender 3.5

I would guess that is happening while it is compiling a folder of jpg images to a cache, which facilitates smooth playback. Seems like normal behavior.

(I meant just an internal keyframed animation in the viewport, not an imported sequence, in case you misunderstood)

Is that really normal? It’s incredibly annoying and seems odd for an animation this lightweight.

Is there a physics sim or something involved that would require it to make a cache?

There isn’t. I am using eevee though, so it might be compiled shaders a lot? Doesn’t make much sense, though.