Always updating shader cache!

[BlazeXI]

Im on latest steam deck version and every day sometimes even twice a day all my games download shadercache again. Its super annoying

[Have Some Die]

What’s so annoying about this? If your capacity is running out there are ways to move your shader cache to a microSD card. How is this a bug? It’s a feature, they do it so your games perform better. You should want those updates, that’s why they push them out. If it’s really so annoying just turn off automatic updates. This post belongs in feature requests, not bugs, but honestly in my opinion it belongs nowhere because the vast majority of users want the latest updates as often as possible.

[MISO4EVER]

Originally posted by BlazeXI:

Im on latest steam deck version and every day sometimes even twice a day all my games download shadercache again. Its super annoying

Yep it’s a terrible design imo and many of the die hard steam deck fanatics will
Gaslight you bait you and harass you for saying so. I hope valve can find another way and or people migrate to other portable hand held pcs that don’t require this every time it’s turned on.

[Have Some Die]

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

Originally posted by BlazeXI:

Im on latest steam deck version and every day sometimes even twice a day all my games download shadercache again. Its super annoying

Yep it’s a terrible design imo and many of the die hard steam deck fanatics will
Gaslight you bait you and harass you for saying so. I hope valve can find another way and or people migrate to other portable hand held pcs that don’t require this every time it’s turned on.

Gaslighting? Maybe I don’t spend much time on this forum but I can’t even picture it. I offered a couple solutions, if y’all don’t wanna take ‘em, then that’s on you. Again it’s no bug, it’s a feature and I guarantee no one at Valve will take you seriously.

I’ll admit, I was a bit annoyed by it at first. Less about storage capacity (I watch it closely and it fluctuates up and down so it’s hard to tell between OS/client/shader cache/misc desktop software like emulators especially) and more because of the excess writes to the SSD. But again, if that’s your main concern, just turn off the updates and only update titles as needed. I’ve never tried, but I assume if you do that you’ll be able to play a game without being forced to update the shader cache the way they force you to take actual game updates before you can launch the game. Or move the shader cache files to an SD card. That option isn’t a built in thing, but there are multiple ways to do it, just google it.

It’s also about your usage habits. I’m rarely seeing multiple updates for the same title in the same day, unless my Deck is left on and idle too long, or if I boot up multiple times in the same day. Try not to let it idle for too long. You can put it to sleep or shut it down, I prefer to shut it down but to each their own. Wi-Fi is disabled when in sleep mode, which ironically is a more annoying issues because what if I want to download a large game without leaving the screen on? I suppose that’s the reason I don’t use sleep mode.

[MISO4EVER]

Originally posted by Have Some Die:

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

Yep it’s a terrible design imo and many of the die hard steam deck fanatics will
Gaslight you bait you and harass you for saying so. I hope valve can find another way and or people migrate to other portable hand held pcs that don’t require this every time it’s turned on.

Gaslighting? Maybe I don’t spend much time on this forum but I can’t even picture it. I offered a couple solutions, if y’all don’t wanna take ‘em, then that’s on you. Again it’s no bug, it’s a feature and I guarantee no one at Valve will take you seriously.

I’ll admit, I was a bit annoyed by it at first. Less about storage capacity (I watch it closely and it fluctuates up and down so it’s hard to tell between OS/client/shader cache/misc desktop software like emulators especially) and more because of the excess writes to the SSD. But again, if that’s your main concern, just turn off the updates and only update titles as needed. I’ve never tried, but I assume if you do that you’ll be able to play a game without being forced to update the shader cache the way they force you to take actual game updates before you can launch the game. Or move the shader cache files to an SD card. That option isn’t a built in thing, but there are multiple ways to do it, just google it.

It’s also about your usage habits. I’m rarely seeing multiple updates for the same title in the same day, unless my Deck is left on and idle too long, or if I boot up multiple times in the same day. Try not to let it idle for too long. You can put it to sleep or shut it down, I prefer to shut it down but to each their own. Wi-Fi is disabled when in sleep mode, which ironically is a more annoying issues because what if I want to download a large game without leaving the screen on? I suppose that’s the reason I don’t use sleep mode.

Thanks for the jester :) (if that was you) each one helps me buy cool new themes and start up movies.

“Can’t picture it”

Sure it’s a feature just a really bad one.
One that eats away at your storage like cancer.

You offered “tips” but they don’t fix the root problem of poor design.

Edit : thank you for the more free points again much appreciated. If you trolls wanna pay me for being butt hurt over a different opinion go ahead. Works for me.

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

Thanks for the jester :) (if that was you) each one helps me buy cool new themes and start up movies.

“Can’t picture it”

Sure it’s a feature just a really bad one.
One that eats away at your storage like cancer.

You offered “tips” but they don’t fix the root problem of poor design.

Tell Nvidia to come to the table and make an agreement like Intel and AMD.
These huge shader cache is a result of companies like Nvidia who refuse to come to the table. Instead of translating iSA, we have this huge compiler with huge caches instead.

[Have Some Die]

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

Thanks for the jester :) (if that was you) each one helps me buy cool new themes and start up movies.

It wasn’t me.

[BlazeXI]

Im 100% sure it’s downloading the same fcking files again when I restart my steam deck, how the heck is that not a bug?

[Have Some Die]

Originally posted by BlazeXI:

Im 100% sure it’s downloading the same fcking files again when I restart my steam deck, how the heck is that not a bug?

Well there may be a bug in terms of reporting the download size. I see that even for much larger game file downloads. Download a multi GB update, reboot, it says it downloaded the same size update again but clearly it didn’t download it twice based on storage capacity. That is a bug I’ve noticed.

[MISO4EVER]

Originally posted by Have Some Die:

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

Thanks for the jester :) (if that was you) each one helps me buy cool new themes and start up movies.

It wasn’t me.

Ok well thanks to the kind donors I got 30k
Points and bought a brand new theme and new start up movies :) it’s great :)

[MISO4EVER]

Originally posted by deaddoof:

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

Thanks for the jester :) (if that was you) each one helps me buy cool new themes and start up movies.

“Can’t picture it”

Sure it’s a feature just a really bad one.
One that eats away at your storage like cancer.

You offered “tips” but they don’t fix the root problem of poor design.

Tell Nvidia to come to the table and make an agreement like Intel and AMD.
These huge shader cache is a result of companies like Nvidia who refuse to come to the table. Instead of translating iSA, we have this huge compiler with huge caches instead.

I don’t need to tell anything to anyone.
It’s once again a product of Linux and bad design. It’s a great idea but needs work to remove all these issues which hinder enjoyment I am just a customer not an engineer or pc developer. Im allowed to share the things I dislike about my purchases.

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

I don’t need to tell anything to anyone.
It’s once again a product of Linux and bad design. It’s a great idea but needs work to remove all these issues which hinder enjoyment I am just a customer not an engineer or pc developer.

Linux? Actually Linux have good graphic drivers as Nvidia pioneered. That design is the result of Nvidia and the graphic industry.

Linux has historically have very little input into the graphic stack. As it turns out, system integrators hate GPU design.

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=141700&curpostid=141714

So your argument is exactly the wrong way around. It's not that the IGP's can't have a adequate market size, it's the discrete GPU's that have market size problems.

And the IGP's are very much moving in the direction of the GPU being more of an general accelerator (AMD calls the combination "APU"s, obviously). And one of the big advantages of integration (apart from just the traditional advantages of fewer chips etc) is that it makes it much easier to share cache hierarchies and be much more tightly coupled at a software level too. Sharing the virtual address space between GPU and CPU threads means less need for copying, and cache coherency makes a lot of things easier and more likely to work well.

We've seen this before, outside of graphics. Sure, you can use MPI on a cluster, and get great performance for some very specific loads. But ask yourself why everybody ends up wanting SMP in the end anyway. The cluster people were simply wrong when they tried to convince people how hardware cache coherency is too expensive. It's just too complicated to come up with efficient programming in a cluster environment.

The exact same is true in GPU's too. People have spent tons of effort into working around the cluster problems, and lots of the graphical libraries and interfaces (think OpenGL) are basically the equivalent of MPI. But look at the direction the industry is actually going: thanks to integration it actually starts making sense to look at tighter couplings not just on a hardware level, but on a software level. Which is why you see all the vendors starting to bring out their "close to metal" models - when you can do memory allocations that "just work" for both the CPU and the GPU, and can pass pointers around, the whole model changes.

And it changes for the better. It's more efficient.

Discrete GPU's are a historical artifact. They're going away. They are inferior technology, and there isn't a big enough market to support them.

Linus

Quote from Linus Torvalds mouth.

Im allowed to share the things I dislike about my purchases.

And we are allow to disagree who is the blame. Beating the wrong party is just plain abusive.

Either way, Valve is funding these efforts for awhile now

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-GPL-Libraries-Shader-Cache

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-GPL-Getting-Good

https://www.supergoodcode.com/through-the-loop/

I would say it will be another decade before we can treat GPU like CPU. Compile to one very low level ISA in which you do not need shader cache anymore. Nvidia always love to change shader as many people love driver overhead and bugs.

[Have Some Die]

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

I don’t need to tell anything to anyone.
It’s once again a product of Linux and bad design. It’s a great idea but needs work to remove all these issues which hinder enjoyment I am just a customer not an engineer or pc developer. Im allowed to share the things I dislike about my purchases.

You don’t need to tell Valve or us either. You absolutely have the right to, but it will fall on deaf ears.
Opinions are like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, everyone has one and they all stink. But we’re providing facts that add valid context. This isn’t a debate, what you and OP are complaining about does not constitute a bug, i.e. software behaving in a way it isn’t intended to, because it’s absolutely intended to do this even if some people don’t like it.

You wanna talk about “bad design” let’s talk about modern Windows. I currently have 3 PCs running Windows 10: my laptop from 2016 which hasn’t been successfully updated since 2019, so I don’t use it anymore; my Shadow PC (in the cloud) which was updated about a month or 2 ago but recently I tried to update it and it was unsuccessful and still says “you are missing important security updates” after several attempts; and, ironically the only fully up to date Windows I own is on a bootable microSD card I use to boot Windows occasionally on my Steam Deck. I say ironically because of the three the Steam Deck is least suited to run Windows. Sure, I can do simple non-gaming tasks or maybe older games, but I wouldn’t even attempt modern games because Windows is not optimized for the Deck and the drivers Valve provides as a courtesy only get you so far. I am so done with Windows, it’s not even funny. Once anti-cheat software that largely doesn’t work well on Linux even with Proton is either ported to Linux or finally made to work through compatibility layers like Proton, hopefully more and more gamers and developers will see the benefits of Linux over Windows. The vast majority of games and other software that run on both run better on Linux. People who wanna prop up Windows gaming are either stuck in the past and yearning for the classic 90’s PC gaming experience, or just programmed to believe Windows will always be the “best” for games because of current compatibility issues. But there’s no law stating games can only run on Windows. It can change if gamers and developers alike get behind what Valve is trying to do, and we’ll all benefit in the long run if we do.

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by Have Some Die:

Opinions are like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, everyone has one and they all stink. But we’re providing facts that add valid context. This isn’t a debate, what you and OP are complaining about does not constitute a bug, i.e. software behaving in a way it isn’t intended to, because it’s absolutely intended to do this even if some people don’t like it.

Hey.. Let the facts sink more gently. Opinions are a pain in the ass to hold onto.

Originally posted by Have Some Die:

You wanna talk about “bad design” let’s talk about modern Windows. I currently have 3

Meh, I wouldn't fault Microsoft too much. They understood they had to leash Nvidia from making their own incompatible ecosystem and avoid destroying any PC gaming.

Nvidia does not want to compete on hardware only. Consumers have larger interest in Nvidia software add on to be served by a third party. Yet, Nvidia will always make themselves look on top.

[MISO4EVER]

Originally posted by Have Some Die:

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

I don’t need to tell anything to anyone.
It’s once again a product of Linux and bad design. It’s a great idea but needs work to remove all these issues which hinder enjoyment I am just a customer not an engineer or pc developer. Im allowed to share the things I dislike about my purchases.

You don’t need to tell Valve or us either. You absolutely have the right to, but it will fall on deaf ears.
Opinions are like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, everyone has one and they all stink. But we’re providing facts that add valid context. This isn’t a debate, what you and OP are complaining about does not constitute a bug, i.e. software behaving in a way it isn’t intended to, because it’s absolutely intended to do this even if some people don’t like it.

You wanna talk about “bad design” let’s talk about modern Windows. I currently have 3 PCs running Windows 10: my laptop from 2016 which hasn’t been successfully updated since 2019, so I don’t use it anymore; my Shadow PC (in the cloud) which was updated about a month or 2 ago but recently I tried to update it and it was unsuccessful and still says “you are missing important security updates” after several attempts; and, ironically the only fully up to date Windows I own is on a bootable microSD card I use to boot Windows occasionally on my Steam Deck. I say ironically because of the three the Steam Deck is least suited to run Windows. Sure, I can do simple non-gaming tasks or maybe older games, but I wouldn’t even attempt modern games because Windows is not optimized for the Deck and the drivers Valve provides as a courtesy only get you so far. I am so done with Windows, it’s not even funny. Once anti-cheat software that largely doesn’t work well on Linux even with Proton is either ported to Linux or finally made to work through compatibility layers like Proton, hopefully more and more gamers and developers will see the benefits of Linux over Windows. The vast majority of games and other software that run on both run better on Linux. People who wanna prop up Windows gaming are either stuck in the past and yearning for the classic 90’s PC gaming experience, or just programmed to believe Windows will always be the “best” for games because of current compatibility issues. But there’s no law stating games can only run on Windows. It can change if gamers and developers alike get behind what Valve is trying to do, and we’ll all benefit in the long run if we do.

You know what else “stinks” waiting 30 minutes to play a game on a hand held device because of a stupid “shader cache” that eats up battery like a fat man at a bbq.

At this point the switch is king it’s reliable battery charges right I can play Skyrim on the go and I don’t have to wait I turn on and play and enjoy. The day valve figures out how to do that simple thing is the day I will praise this device. Until then it was a purchase regret.

“There is no debate”

Yes there is.

[Have Some Die]

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

You know what else “stinks” waiting 30 minutes to play a game on a hand held device because of a stupid “shader cache” that eats up battery like a fat man at a bbq.

What are you connected via dial-up? It takes a few seconds on my end. I’m sure you’re exaggerating, either that or you don’t know the difference between shader cache updates (single digit MB downloads max) and actual game updates.

Originally posted by Izzythecat:

At this point the switch is king it’s reliable battery charges right I can play Skyrim on the go and I don’t have to wait I turn on and play and enjoy. The day valve figures out how to do that simple thing is the day I will praise this device. Until then it was a purchase regret.

Sounds like you bought something on impulse without doing your research. I also have a Switch, which I lost interest in years ago because I’m a PC gamer at heart, like 99% of this forum. I even modded my Switch just so I could transfer my BotW save file over to the Deck. I converted it to work with the Wii U version because it runs so much better on Cemu. With the right settings, the game runs better on the Deck than it does on the Switch.

Don’t get me wrong, I have mixed feelings about Valve as a corporation as well. Certainly Gaben has made himself very wealthy off of Steam and they barely make games anymore. I’m rooting for the Deck and SteamOS and Linux in general, but I’ve got my eye on them. I’m glad for everything Valve has done for Linux gaming, but that doesn’t mean they can rest on their laurels now. They do have to continue working hard on improving the software, and SteamOS for other handhelds and system builders should’ve been out a while ago. Almost seems like now that they have stiff competition from Asus and Lenovo they’re being a bit hesitant to release optimized versions for non-Valve devices. But let’s face it, Valve doesn’t want to be the Apple of PC gaming, they don’t want to create their own walled garden, or so they claim. We’ll see…