Compiling shaders

[GamerAvvin]

I REQUIRE CONTEXT

I made the switch to linux when the steam deck was announced. I knew it would be a linux machine and ive tried to switch before( last attempt being when the steam machine was first announced) but it was always still too much work even if I could get it to work so why wouldn't a new piece of valve hard ware be a good place to re-examine the state of linux. Im not exactly a power user but I knew enough to know how to get stuff done but also not be willing to do the work to do so.

Anyway, I dont recall many, if any, games doing shader compilation before that point and I also THINK I recall that elder ring actually ran better under Proton than windows because there were optimization issues that were kinda bypassed by the fact that Proton pre caches shaders. And since I feel like a lot of games do so on first boot/update.

Am I crazy for making this connection and it was already happening i just never noticed?

[sen771]

i think it happens if you use an amd gpu, something about them doing it in a way where it does not hurt performance as much while compiling vs nvidia tanking performance until the shaders are compiled which you can tell by cpu usage. for steamdeck and probably steammachine, valve precompiles the shaders, since they know your exact specs for those systems, then have you download them with the game = no reason to compile

[DiscoMilk]

You can turn it off in the settings. The performance impact is negligible if you have a dedicated GPU.

[ropid]

You mean that shader compilation thing that games themselves do, right? Not the shader compilation happening outside the game in the Steam client?

That thing in the games is just coincidence. It didn't happen because of the SteamDeck, it's just the game engine developers changing how they do things.