Hi guys.
I’ve finally returned to Linux gaming after a year hiatus back on Windows but currently have been unable to play anything due to Steam’s shader caching. Trying to launch a game means I have to sit and leave my PC on for hours (I gave up after 2) just whilst the progress bar slowly goes up. I made sure background caching was on in the settings and even added a config file to enable more threads as I saw suggested online but after leaving Steam open overnight I’m still unable to play any games.
This wasn’t an issue when I was dailying Linux a year ago so I’m assuming something in Proton must’ve changed?
I experienced this with Boulders Gate 3. Shader caching window popped up and 20 minutes later it was at 5%. I haven’t tried again since them because it’s running fine on my desktop.
Never seen that happen.
Which games? Have you tried just disabling caching?
So far that’s for A Hat In Time, Resident Evil 6, Battle bit Remastered and DuckTales Remastered.disabling caching means games run really poorly.
Damn that sucks. Sorry I don’t know how to fix that. Which distro are you running?
Sometimes my PC also starts annoyingly long shader caching as I’m trying to play a game. If you cancel the shader caching, does the game not launch?
Otherwise if you suspect the issue is with Proton,you could use an older version and see if that helps?
Games will eventually launch after about 5 minutes if I skip but will run really poorly.
At this point graphics driver optimizations have made the steam shader caching feature obsolete. I would recommend disabling it in the steam settings.
You should be able to skip that AFAIK. The first time you load into a game (and after a driver or game update) it’ll be slightly laggier as the shaders get compiled but afterwards it shouldn’t have too big of a difference.
The is a setting in steam to allow that to happen in the background.
what distro? What’s your gpu?
Happened on Arch last night and this morning switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed with the exact same issues. GPU is a GTX 1070 with nvidia drivers installed.
I think You can turn shader pre-caching off in steam options since your gpu should use gpl in games and see is there any change in game performance.
Is there anything else going on in the background? Is something else using up your drives or CPU/GPU time?
I’ve been exclusively on Linux for a while, and I know shader caching happens, but I’ve never noticed it happening. AFAIK it should be very quick and seamless for the most part.
Are you perhaps using the Flatpak version of Steam?
No nothing else is running. Just Steam. It was happening on Arch last night and I switched to openSUSE this morning and get the same problem. Both times Steam was installed through the native package manager.
I don’t know what the issue is; but something to try if you haven’t already is to go through the setup instructions on the Arch Wiki, paying special attention to making sure that you have the correct 32-bit graphics dependencies installed.
Oh, I forgot to do my fanboy plug. I’ve had the easiest time setting up Proton dependencies on NixOS. It unifies configuration with package management, so the Steam configuration module can reference your installed hardware, and load the appropriate graphics packages automatically.
Basically you opt into unfree packages, and put
programs.steam.enable = truein your NixOS config, and that’s it.
