This is exciting news for those of us with small Steam Deck SSDs or paralyzed options for uninstalling games. Valve has confirmed with PC Gamer that an upcoming update to Steam Deck’s open source video driver will reduce shader cache files for gaming handhelds by approximately 60%.
Recent reports in phonics “Reimplement RADV pipeline cache based on generic vk_pipeline_cache” Highlighted update planned for Mesa 23.1. There are many words in that sentence that probably don’t mean much to you. Most importantly, Mesa is an OpenGL and Vulkan video driver, contributed by Valve, AMD, Intel, Microsoft and others in a rare coalition. , and this change affects how the currently widely used Vulkan driver caches files.
For Steam Decks, Valve created large shader cache files for each individual game. This is delivered during the installation process and helps improve performance and avoid the dreaded shader compilation stutters. The downside of these shader caches is the amount of space they occupy. A large game can be several gigabytes. However, with the new Vulkan pipeline cache, they are even smaller.
“Up to 60% reduction in cache size when combined with single-file disk caching” on Gitlab Say. He at Valve emailed Pierre-Loup Griffais to confirm that this applies to shader cache files for Steam decks. “That’s our expectation for pre-built shader caches,” he confirmed. Griffais added that some games may not shrink their cache files as dramatically. This is because the update “doesn’t change anything about the size of the transcoded video depot and is marked as ‘shader pre-cache’ in the UI. “
So when will this update arrive? Mesa driver 23.1 stable will be released. early May, SteamOS 3.5 will also be released soon, including graphics driver updates. We expect the two things to happen at the same time, first with his SteamOS release in beta and then with the stable release earlier this summer. At least if you’re in the northern hemisphere, it’s going to be a good season to hang out in a hammock and play some Steam Decks.
However, if you still feel like you’re running out of space after this update, check out our tutorial on upgrading your Steam Deck SSD. (opens in new tab).
