Are you on Linux? There’s constant shader pre caching updates on my steam deck. I ended up turning it off, it was taking way too much space on my deck.
That space is required to run the games. They contain the vulkan equivalent shaders that have been translated from directx, this has to be done for each material shader in each game. Unless they are stored somewhere, it has to be done again every time you run a game, causing stutter.
Shaders will need to be compiled either way, not downloading pre-cached shaders just means the deck will create them when you run the game, using the deck GPU to do it instead of steam servers. It will then store them for later use, using up the storage anyway.
By turning them off, the only difference will be that the deck is now wasting battery power on compiling the shaders on its own, rather than grabbing them pre-done from steam servers.
You might get away with not downloading them all, if you only play one or two games, but this will mean that not all installed games are actually playable, as you’ll run out of space for shaders if you used up the space you “saved”.
It’s worth noting that this is only a thing on the deck. Valve does not provide pre-compiled shaders for any other GPU. (Though you can tell steam to compile them in the background so your games are always ready to go.)
Since currently I’m only playing Satisfactory, and I have downloaded the shader’s, it should not come back the next day? Or is that wrong?
I mean, it’s not the download which annoy me, its the time before I can start the game. It takes ages to download this 170MB from steam server’s. Normally 170MB is transferred really fast for other things, but the update takes 5 minutes and longer from steam server’s.
As far as I can tell that space never got refilled. Probably because I have 40+ games installed but usually only play 5 or so. I haven’t noticed a performance impact and it’s saved me tons of bandwidth (my ISP sucks).
Yes. Arch Linux, but on a laptop. Nice combination. I thought the pre-caching is displayed as a separate dialog for Vulkan, which I can interrupt, if I want.
But I have every day a message directly right nearby the play button which reads something about “Download Update…” and the play button is grayed out.