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.

  • Sentau@feddit.de
    8·
    1 year ago

    This is not a Linux specific issue though it’s worse on Linux because vulkan shader processing happens for almost every game. I remember people on windows complaining that The Last of Us was compiling shaders for several hours when first launched and that if shader compilation was skipped the game was laggy as hell(which is not a surprise considering how poor the game ran even after shader compilation)

  • priapus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    What GPU are you using and what driver version? Both AMD and Nvidia have added support for VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library which greatly improve performance while compiling. I prefer just skipping shader compilation, since most games will perform fine doing it while playing.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      1060, 6Gb x i5 8600

      535.113.01-0ubuntu0.22.04.3

      It’s faster than when I first came to Linux, sure. And I see that my 6yo mid setup doesn’t work okay in big games if I skip this, and is slower than most recent builds of the same price range.

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        I think honestly if you’re not willing to upgrade your pc there’s not a lot you can do other than wait for potential optimization

        Shader caching on a modern pc for anything but big chunky triple a games takes less than 5 minutes

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yup, shader updates on Steam dropped significantly when I upgraded my GTX 960 to an RX 6650XT.

          It still takes some time on my 3500U APU laptop, but I rarely play anything on that system.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    5·
    1 year ago

    Ultimately this is what it’s running in the background: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Fossilize

    The idea is to make sure your graphics card shader cache is full with everything the game may use at some point, enabling smoother play and less hitching.

    I think on NVIDIA, the cache ain’t that big by default so it may be recompiling everything from scratch, whereas it’s less noticeable on AMD systems because it’s already compiled it so only compiles what’s changed/new.

    This issue suggests it’s currently pretty broken on NVIDIA right now: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9803

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Didn’t know they have a github account. Thanks for pasting these links. I’d study this Q more while another reshadering is going on.

      What isn’t broken with Nvidia? :b

  • Zeerooth@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
    1·
    1 year ago

    I agree that’s very annoying sometimes but at the same time very beneficial for in-game performance as it greatly reduces the amount of computations the game has to do at runtime. If you have a powerful enough PC or the game isn’t very demanding you can just disable shader pre-caching in steam settings and it shouldn’t matter much but it’s a real life saver for more demanding titles and imo worth all that wait.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I hear you. I’m really just venting.

      The catch is those non-demanding games are fast to reshader. It’s only when you face a heavyweight release this starts to matter, and wastes time accordingly :)