For the past few months or so, steam precaching has been out of control. I have to download between 10 and 30 GB of shader precache data per day. That is extremely ridiculous. Steam's shader caches are quite often almost as large as the game itself. For example: the image here is a game that is ~7GB for the full game, downloading 10GB of shader precache. If I download an average of 30GB of shaders per day, then that is almost 1TB of data downloaded written per month just in shaders...
Not to mention that games I play regularly like CS2 get a precache update literally every 2 days that is 5-10GB and if I manage to cancel it, there is 0 difference in performance at all.
Also fossilize replay that takes 20%-50% CPU load, sometimes for an hour and is the single highest user of disk IO on my entire system. I would be concerned about SSD wear if it was during the early times of ssd just because of the massive amount of writes.
I'm all for downloading shader precaching, but at normal intervals of after updates, not just randomly every few days when there hasn't been a game update in months or years. I don't want to delete all of my games because I only have 100/30 internet, so it would take me a long time too redownload games.
Has anyone else been seeing these ridiculous intervals and datasets of shader cache? Could there at least be a selective pre-caching setting only for games that I play regularly so I am not caching shaders for games that I haven't played in 2 years?
I had this problem for awhile, eventually I said enough and turned off shader pre-caching. Never noticed a difference in performance.
Personally I deactivated pre-caching quite recently actually as I noticed as well this getting quite excessive for certain games. So I now wait until this is a thing: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/6486 Seemingly the issue seems to be with games that have a big workshop like A Hat in Time or just huge games like No Man's Sky. I got 10GB and 5GB shader cache updates daily for these games respectively before I turned it off.
I would recommend to turn off auto updates, I was also having a lot of shader cache to download daily(when rebooting) but after scheduling auto updates between 4AM - 5AM and that fixed it for me
I prefer to keep Shader Precaching on for the Media Foundation fix that Valve uses, but I left Background Processing of Vulkan Shaders off, if I'm not wrong this way it should only update when you open a game.
Alternatively you could disable it and use Proton-GE for the games that need the Media Foundation fix. Performance should be the same nowadays with it on or off.
