Steam Ironing Out Shader Pre-Caching For Helping Game Load Times, Stuttering

Valve developers have been working on Vulkan shader pre-caching with their latest Steam client betas to help in allowing Vulkan/SPIR-V shaders to compile ahead of time, letting them be pre-cached on disk to allow for quicker game load times and any stuttering for games that otherwise would be compiling the shaders on-demand during gameplay, especially under Steam Play.

This Vulkan shader pre-caching is the culmination of other Linux graphics infrastructure work they have been engaged on in recent months with their Fossilize project and RADV secure compile support.

This shader pre-caching is an opt-in feature in the latest betas as it will spin up the extra work ahead of time. With the latest beta released on Friday now is threaded cache handling for the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver, the Vulkan pipeline processing that happens in the background will now default to using a quarter of the logical CPU cores (thread count) by default, the priority of the tasks has been lowered, and the Vulkan API version updated.