What am I missing here?

Putting up those guardrails temporarily hides big problems more often than it avoids needing to have them solved.

So for BG3, if you don't have 150Gb free on your disk, steam will download it on a different disk and then transfer it over, thrashing you disk.

It's bizarre, incredibly annoying, behaviour and I wish it would just ask so I'd know that was about to happen and just clean up some space. Or refuse the upgrade.

But steam want to force upgrades on users before you can play anything, which for single player games is incredibly frustrating. I get why they do it, but it's another one of those things where you feel like you aren't in control of the thing you paid a lot of money for.

You could do that in the past and I did occasionally for single player games because my internet connection wasn't the best and I did not want to waste the little time I could allocate for gaming.

From my guess, Steam support Vulkan shader pre-compilation so that you don't have to wait in game (like the infamous 10 min Monster Hunter Wilds startup delay). They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version. Since fewer Windows games use Vulkan this feature is often not used, but on Linux most games will run on Vulkan (esp. Proton games with dxvk) you may experience the process more often.

I have been having the issue with the system hanging up when steam is doing big writes. I had assumed it was due to something wrong with my drive and was contemplating reformatting it.

This would imply that if I already calculated the shaders for the current game state than i could reuse them and not have to go through the whole compilation step (if no changes happen inbetween).

Matter of fact, i have to recompile the shaders on every game start for every game, even if i restart the game just x times in a row.

For context: using linux/debian and basically running everything on vulcan

Shader precompilation is a standard thing to do now - consoles mostly ship precompiled shaders for their GPU + driver combo, Steam Deck will also download precompiled shader for its Linux + AMD + driver version combo.

The infrastructure for that Steam side is there and is in active use.

I don't think I ever found more documents on this feature. I assume it might need lots of users with matching result to ensure that bad actor can't upload malicious shader.

Tho i would expect (naive me) that the shaders at least might be cached locally - which is not the case since as i mentioned in my comment have to recompile them for every game every time i start.

What fossilize does is it generates data of all the parameters passed to shader compilation, and then can trigger "offline" compilation before you run the game.

This just , from a technical stance, doesnt make sense to me.

As another commenter to my statement wrote, it might be to make sure enaugh people have the same result on my HW setup in order to make sure its not abused for maleware. That makes sense to me tho i still dont get why there is not at least some local steam client caching.

And while as mentioned this might not work with every game - well it works with none. Im talking about a quite big set of games. So maybe im just VERY unlucky and ALL games i play have dynamic params which as you mention would result in recompilations every time - will have to look if i can approve this somehow.

Alternativly, which is why i mentioned using debian, its a linux issue of some sort (just a guess).

Thanks for explaination tho

What Steam does is to skip the compilation and download it from a cdn.

In your case something is not letting the driver cache the compilation.

Thanks for the hint tho, if i should find the time to investigate that further this will definatly safe me some time on searching the cause-

https://www.techpowerup.com/239687/latest-steam-client-beta-...

Disclaimer: I don’t even like macOS.

I wrote a user space memory reclaimer and have not got a lockup since. https://gist.github.com/EBADBEEF/f168458028f684a91148f4d3e79...

I am amazed this game is even playable on the steam deck. Was trying to find an excuse to play it after cyberpunk. I guess this one it is…