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🦊Trapezoid 25 May @ 2:49am
Vulcan Shaders every time?
Hi I have question about Vulcan Shaders. Every time I boot my system (Bazzite KDE) and try run a game (this problem include TF2 ONLY) I have to wait for Vulcan Shaders.
Game and Steam is installed on same SSD. I don't wanna see tons of small files in my steam folder and reinstall steam for getting my disk space.

A few months ago I had same problem on my SteamDeck. A few games wanted new Vulcan Shaders every time, and all of those files takes so much disc space.

Is it any way to manage those files?
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Showing 1-5 of 5 comments
Yoth 25 May @ 8:18am 
In the download settings you can enable shader pre-caching and background processing, then it will automatically process shaders after every update and the game will start immediately.
#1
Yoth 25 May @ 9:53am 
Originally posted by Xenophobe:
If your pc/laptop is from the last 5 years or so
Any GPU that supports vulkan 1.3.210 or newer no longer requires pre-caching for performance reasons. Which is from RX 400-series (2016) and Nvidia 900-series (2014) onward. Having pre-caching enabled might still be useful if you never want to wait for shader compilation even after a game update.
Last edited by Yoth; 25 May @ 10:10am
#2
Yoth 25 May @ 12:14pm 
I just did some tests with Talos Principle Reawakened. When I disable the shader pre-cache the first load of every map takes significantly longer (20+ seconds) because of shader compilation. The shaders get cached afterwards which significantly improves the load time on the second run. I guess in the end it's up to preference. Both settings have their ups and downs. Pre-cache enabled gives faster loads and no compilation, cache off prevents 1GB of downloads a day on large steam libraries.
Last edited by Yoth; 25 May @ 12:21pm
#3
🦊Trapezoid 26 May @ 5:48am 
Originally posted by Xenophobe:
If your pc/laptop is from the last 5 years or so, you can disable shader precaching. Your system will create it's own shader cache specific to your hardware, it will compile once at a game start and only recompile on a driver update or game update (rarely on an OS update).

For the steam deck, having the shader precaching enabled may be beneficial being a handheld on wifi, but I don't own one so this is just a guess.

Edit: some games are coded to generate shaders every launch, nothing can be done about that by end users.

Ok i disabled it and I hope this 17yo Valve's slop will run with my gtx 1070
#4
🦊Trapezoid 26 May @ 7:57am 
Originally posted by Xenophobe:
Originally posted by 🦊Trapezoid:

Ok i disabled it and I hope this 17yo Valve's slop will run with my gtx 1070
it should, I was using a 1070 4 years ago ... how well it works will also depend on cpu, ram, ssd and/or hdd speeds.

also check in the steamapps folder for a shader cache folder (can't remember the exact name, but it was obviously shaders), if memory serves it does not get removed when you disable shader precaching and you can reclaim some disk space by deleting it.

Yeah this folder is mess. But still not that messy like on my SteamDeck. Valve should do something to manage those files.
Saying half of them are non-steam files is not a managment.
#5
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Steam for Linux > Valve Games and Steam for Linux Client > Topic Details
Date Posted: 25 May @ 2:49am
Posts: 5

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