Latest Steam Client Beta Introduces Shader Pre-Caching for Games

The latest update for the Steam software brought with it an important new addition for the quality of life of gamers under the Linux or Windows suns everywhere: persistent shader caches for games. In the latest change-log, users are treated to the following message: Shader caches for games launched by Steam are placed in separate folders next to their Steam Library folder and are deleted when each game is uninstalled, or when switching drivers or graphics cards. Individual shaders are tracked and cataloged by the Steam servers in preparation for distributing pre-compiled shaders. This tracking can incur slight additional bandwidth use. The system can be disabled by setting the environment variable STEAM_ENABLE_SHADER_CACHE_MANAGEMENT=0".

Under Steam Settings, you'll find a new Shader Pre-Caching item. The description reads as follows: "Shader Pre-Caching allows Steam to download pre-compiled GPU shaders matching your system configuration. This allows Vulkan and OpenGL games to load faster and improve framerate stability during gameplay. If enabled, Steam will collect shaders from your system when needed. Enabling this feature may slightly increase disk and bandwidth usage."

There's also a handy counter for you to know exactly how many MB are being used by the Shader Pre-Caching feature. If you have a capped bandwidth internet service, however, you'd do well to pay particular attention to this feature, lest it eats through your available data cap. However, users should be met with decreased loading times, and a more stable framerate as instances where shaders must be loaded in new areas will be reduced. All in all, it's always better to actually have the option to enable this feature than not having it altogether. Users over at the Linux camp are reporting increased, more fluid framerates and decreased loading times in games such as Painkiller (52 MB cache), Deadfall Adventures (104 MB cache), and Borderlands 2 (11 MB cache).

Shader Pre-Caching is nothing new, and is even part of Microsoft's DX12 specification. However, it would seem that this Windows feature was missing enough code for OpenGL and Vulkan games that Steam decided to take the matter into their own hands through this baking-in in the Steam client. At the same time, with DX12 games dwindling in number and becoming few and far between with sometimes questionable games over their previous incarnations, the Steam Shader Pre-Caching stands to pick up the shader cache slack in older API's.