It feels like I mine bitcoins for our Great Daddy Gaben every other update, setting my CPU at 100% for a long time.
I know it makes difference (to skipping it and eating lags), it works, but how it doesn’t use previous literal gigabytes of generated shaders, starting from 0% every time? Why it takes so much time?
I feel like I’m a dumbass and I miss something obvious. Or I just feel like I’m alone with it? Do you guys all deal with it?
Am sitting at 66% percents, my PC heats like it renders video in Premiere, just to let me play the game I’ve played yesterday again. Guess all my recycling and replanting routine can fuck right off with that power consumption. Sorry, nature, I tried.
But anyway if you are tired of it or knows some tricks, write what’s on your mind.
The Bitcoin thing was a joke about how it uses so much CPU/GPU, it almost feels as if he’s mining crypto for Daddy Gaben.
His actual complaint is that the shaders seem to get recompiled on every game launch, which takes forever, instead of just re-using the ones it compiled previously.
Well I can explain the latter:
Steam has a very simple but extensive distribution system in that if the client (your machine) has X combination of hardware, it will frequently check for updates to any files the publisher has pushed upstream. The Steam platform has a compilation mechanism to pre-build graphics and shader caches for end-user clients to prevent them from having to do all that work, so when a publisher tweaks something related to graphics, Steam’s backend will build distributed versiona of these compiled shareders and textures and make them available to clients to save your local machine from having to do that work itself on update and launch.
You can disable the behavior in the downloads settings from what I remember. I’m sure you can Google get more specific about how you want that handled, but it can be disabled, your local machine will just have to spend more effort to build them itself to satisfy the requirement the game. You’re spending more money on your energy bill this way vs just letting the steam client download the pre-built versions.