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?
Shader caching is a thing that happens when you’re playing a game. The first time you see an effect (like particles), your computer has to process that and cache it for the future. This can sometimes cause stuttering for larger effects, so shader pre-caching is a thing that downloads all these shaders for you so you won’t stutter while playing.
It’s useful for older PCs where stuttering can be very noticeable, but it’s probably something you should turn off unless you think you need it.
Yeah normally, but in some circumstances on Linux an excessive amount of shader caches are downloaded. I tried Linux gaming on a ~50GB partition and quickly ran out of space because of all the shaders.