The Steamdeck is killing my fun in gaming

[FreeLuigi]

This thing is out for 2 years now, and it's still an absolutely glitchy and buggy experience to use it as your primary gaming device. If you intend to use desktop mode, your experience will be even worse.

I recently started playing Path of Exile 2, and it's virtually impossible to just casually play for an hour if you feel like it.

Anytime I want to launch the game, the Steamdeck needs to re-download a shader pre-cache update. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

How is that a shippable feature, let alone 2 years after the full release of the device?

Then once the shader pre-cache update is downloaded, the game itself is greeting me with a loading screen "Processing Vulkan shaders", which takes another 20 minutes.

So basically if I want to play for an hour, I need to commit to an hour of updates and shader processing first. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Granted, not every game does this as annoyingly as POE2 does, but for a game pretending to be "Steam Deck verified", this is simply pathetic. It also goes to show that Valve is throwing out the "verified" badge rather willy nilly.

I don't even want to go into all the different bugs, inconsistencies or performance issues you're experiencing on the regular with this device, I'm just tired of it all.

The Steamdeck is such an amazing concept in theory, but the execution feels so half-a**ed on almost every single feature.

And sadly, I haven't seen any major improvements to the experience in the last 2 years.

[Gurtiev]

Downloading shaders helps your system avoid stutters during gameplay, and is normally only an issue with new titles or when new content is added to the game. Over time, this tends to get better. When I'm playing older titles, it rarely downloads new shaders, and when it does, it only takes 2-4 seconds more to launch.

I know that in some cases the game can redownload shader files that are multiple gigabytes long, and that is frustrating. If you don't want to download precompiled shaders, you can disable it in the settings menu, under the Downloads submenu.

[FreeLuigi]

Originally posted by Gurtiev:

Downloading shaders helps your system avoid stutters during gameplay, and is normally only an issue with new titles or when new content is added to the game. Over time, this tends to get better. When I'm playing older titles, it rarely downloads new shaders, and when it does, it only takes 2-4 seconds more to launch.

I know that in some cases the game can redownload shader files that are multiple gigabytes long, and that is frustrating. If you don't want to download precompiled shaders, you can disable it in the settings menu, under the Downloads submenu.

Downloading shaders is hardly the problem, I get why that's necessary.

Downloading them each time I fire up my Steamdeck is beyond braindead.

[Mahjik]

If your biggest problem is the pre-cache shaders, just disable them.

[FreeLuigi]

That may work for some games, not for games like POE2 though. The performance on the deck - despite being verified - is rather shaky. And without preloading them, the stuttering is unbearable.

[Mahjik]

The shaders are built and don't rebuild again until the OS, GPU, or game updates.

A lot people have disabled the pre-shader cache for the same reasons it annoys you and have not had problems.

[Mahjik]

BTW, it's not something you cannot re-enable. Disable it and try it. Worse case, you turn it back on.

[[?]legit]

Originally posted by AAAbuser:

And sadly, I haven't seen any major improvements to the experience in the last 2 years.

Sad, but true.

[thetargos]

Shader preaching started off as a feature of Steam on Linux, and yes, for those of us that launched Steam to play games, only to close it once your play session ended, and relaunched it to have another go, indeed, every time you startup Steam, it will check your current cache with the one on the server, and update accordingly... this is indeed especially annoying for games that happen to have lots of updated content (and shaders) in short periods of time (CS:GO, CS2, TF2, DOTA2, etc), which despite having native clients, if you have the precache enabled, will still fetch data off Valve's servers.

This is "worse" for game that run under Proton, as the former games I listed have at least their shaders built in the right format, GLSL>SPIRV IR, where as Windows DirectX games have their shaders written in HLSL and use DX's IR (seems DX12 be supporting SPIRV, having a bit less of an overhead), so shader precache for these games is a HUGE advantage (and much of what yields the Deck part of its console-like experience). If available, the shaders will be downloaded in binary format, meaning the client just runs them, other times it's the translated HLSL>GLSL shaders bulk, which your client has to still process (hence the [in]famous processing Vulkan shaders screen), which have still to be built for your specific hardware, even if it is a Deck, as there are no binaries (or full binaries) available, yet. Yes, Valve could (and has) make available prebuilt shaders for popular games, especially for an immutable platform as the Deck, however these are done in a case-to-case basis.

While annoying upfront, shader preache is one of the reasons some games magically work better on Linux (and hence SteamOS, and the Deck) under Proton, since all DirectX calls (at least from DX9 era games) are run through Vulkan, and all shaders are cached and translated into the right format.

I for one, am thankful Valve took the risky decision to have games delay their launch a but on your side, and provide a great experience in comparison. You have the option to disable this behaviour whenever you want, though... with the consequence of having games performing much worse due to shader building.

[Falkentyne]

Originally posted by AAAbuser:

That may work for some games, not for games like POE2 though. The performance on the deck - despite being verified - is rather shaky. And without preloading them, the stuttering is unbearable.

Instead of farming clown awards, why don't you go buy a different handheld and stop wasting your time here? No award from me.
Go buy your AI 370 32GB Win Max or whatever.

[Gurtiev]

Originally posted by AAAbuser:

That may work for some games, not for games like POE2 though. The performance on the deck - despite being verified - is rather shaky. And without preloading them, the stuttering is unbearable.

You already have downloaded precompiled shaders, so every time you redownload them is because of some minor update.
Try to play the game with pre-cache disabled. You already have 99% of it downloaded anyway.
As long as you don't delete the files you should be good to go.

[S.O.B]

To me the SD Oled is an amazing device, still having a lot of fun with it. No issues at all for me, but there certainly is some kind of „comfort zone“ and depending on the priorities it’s maybe not for everyone.
Besides the great ergonomics and the beautiful screen, I’m absolutely impressed by the efficiency. Undervolting and tweaking tdp settings gives me a playtime of around 3.5 hrs in Witcher 3 (high settings, 30fps, medium screen brightness).

[FreeLuigi]

Originally posted by Falkentyne:

Originally posted by AAAbuser:

That may work for some games, not for games like POE2 though. The performance on the deck - despite being verified - is rather shaky. And without preloading them, the stuttering is unbearable.

Instead of farming clown awards, why don't you go buy a different handheld and stop wasting your time here? No award from me.
Go buy your AI 370 32GB Win Max or whatever.

I'm sorry that customer feedback towards a Billion Dolllar corporation you're in no way affiliated with upsets you so deeply that you have to become defensive and snarky to a total stranger on the internet.

Totally healthy, not a deranged mindset corrupted by capitalism at all.

Stay cool, my dude.

[GANG]

Originally posted by S.O.B:

To me the SD Oled is an amazing device, still having a lot of fun with it. No issues at all for me, but there certainly is some kind of „comfort zone“ and depending on the priorities it’s maybe not for everyone.
Besides the great ergonomics and the beautiful screen, I’m absolutely impressed by the efficiency. Undervolting and tweaking tdp settings gives me a playtime of around 3.5 hrs in Witcher 3 (high settings, 30fps, medium screen brightness).

Egonomicsnof SD is ass

[S.O.B]

Originally posted by Spinggus:

Originally posted by S.O.B:

To me the SD Oled is an amazing device, still having a lot of fun with it. No issues at all for me, but there certainly is some kind of „comfort zone“ and depending on the priorities it’s maybe not for everyone.
Besides the great ergonomics and the beautiful screen, I’m absolutely impressed by the efficiency. Undervolting and tweaking tdp settings gives me a playtime of around 3.5 hrs in Witcher 3 (high settings, 30fps, medium screen brightness).

Egonomicsnof SD is ass

Never tried it with ass but in my hands it feels comfortable and I guess that’s highly subjective.

[Haruspex]

I have noticed that newer and popular titles have more frequent shader cache updates. I think POE2 qualifies there. Those updates should slow down and become less frequent as time goes on.

I haven't played POE2 myself, but I've never seen any game take 20 minutes to process the shaders.

Not seeing any improvement to the shader cache situation in the last 2 years just isn't true at all. Valve changed the frequency of those updates so it will hold off on downloading them if you haven't played an installed game for a while. It used to be it would update the shaders for every game you have installed. The newer MESA update also slashed the size of the shader cache files by more than half. Maybe POE2 is unique in this regard due to being new and popular, but I don't even consider it an inconvenience for any game I'm playing. I barely notice most of the time.

But hey, I'm not going to try and invalidate how you're feeling about things. Your experience is your experience and there's nothing I can say that will take that away from you. You are 100% entitled to it. I just can't empathize. Feel free to vent though.