For the past few months or so, steam precaching has been out of control. I have to download between 10 and 30 GB of shader precache data per day. That is extremely ridiculous. Steam’s shader caches are quite often almost as large as the game itself. For example: the image here is a game that is ~7GB for the full game, downloading 10GB of shader precache. If I download an average of 30GB of shaders per day, then that is almost 1TB of data downloaded written per month just in shaders…
Not to mention that games I play regularly like CS2 get a precache update literally every 2 days that is 5-10GB and if I manage to cancel it, there is 0 difference in performance at all.
Also fossilize replay that takes 20%-50% CPU load, sometimes for an hour and is the single highest user of disk IO on my entire system. I would be concerned about SSD wear if it was during the early times of ssd just because of the massive amount of writes.
I’m all for downloading shader precaching, but at normal intervals of after updates, not just randomly every few days when there hasn’t been a game update in months or years. I don’t want to delete all of my games because I only have 100/30 internet, so it would take me a long time too redownload games.
Has anyone else been seeing these ridiculous intervals and datasets of shader cache? Could there at least be a selective pre-caching setting only for games that I play regularly so I am not caching shaders for games that I haven’t played in 2 years?
It’s getting fucking ridiculous and I tried to turn it off but the stuttering was horrible
I now finally know why Rocket League updates more often for me (1-2GB of updates) than my friend on Windows.
I agree that there should be better control in steam over what games are prioritized for both updates and shader caching.
But I was under the impression that most shader precaching was done by compiling locally in the background (via fossilize), not downloading. I agree that a 10GB download for AHIT is sus, but I don’t see anywhere on the screen that denotes it is downloading shaders.
Nonetheless, the shader pipeline problems of these new APIs (both pipeline explosion and caching) are not solved yet. IMO caching is not solved because GPU vendors don’t allow their new drivers to work with “old” shader pipelines. They have no incentive to (it would require extra driver work, and you couldn’t force users to use your latest compiler optimizations), and gamers don’t know to ask for it.
If you see that little i there, that is information that says “shader precaching” as the information when hovered over. It will generally be a blue patchnotes icon for a game update and an i for steam updates like precaching.
Personally I deactivated pre-caching quite recently actually as I noticed as well this getting quite excessive for certain games. So I now wait until this is a thing: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/6486 Seemingly the issue seems to be with games that have a big workshop like A Hat in Time or just huge games like No Man’s Sky. I got 10GB and 5GB shader cache updates daily for these games respectively before I turned it off.
I prefer to keep Shader Precaching on for the Media Foundation fix that Valve uses, but I left Background Processing of Vulkan Shaders off, if I’m not wrong this way it should only update when you open a game.
Alternatively you could disable it and use Proton-GE for the games that need the Media Foundation fix. Performance should be the same nowadays with it on or off.
