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Just switched back to Linux (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So after one of my recent comments about if Linux is ready for gaming, I decided to pick-up a new Intel based wifi adapter (old one was broadcom and the drivers on fedora sucked and would drop connection every few minutes).

So far everything is great! Performance wise I can usually run every game about one tier higher graphically (med -> high) with the same or better performance than on Windows. This is on an rx 5700 and an ultrawide.

Bazzite is running great as always. Still getting used to the immutability of the system as I usually use Arch btw, but there are obviously workarounds to that.

Overall I'm still getting used to the Steam "processing vulkan shaders" pretty much every time a game updates, but it's worth it for the extra performance. Now I'm 100% Linux for my gaming between my Steamdeck and PC.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Overall I’m still getting used to the Steam “processing vulkan shaders” pretty much every time a game updates, but it’s worth it for the extra performance.

That can be turned off, though. Haven't noticed much of a difference after doing so (though, I am a filthy nvidia-user). Also saving quite a bit of disk space while too.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

Yeah I saw that when I was previously running into this, but wasn't sure if it would leave performance on the table. Also, I'm curious if you could run it once, turn it off so you don't process them again, and if that would be beneficial for subsequent runs of the game even after updates (assuming not since they'd probably be invalidated).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (9 children)

turning it off will wipe the cached shaders. That cleaned up like ~40 GB (IIRC) for me, without any noticeable difference in performance, stability or smoothness. Though my set of games at the time wasn't all that big: path of exile, subnautica: below zero, portal 2 and some random smaller games.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Aah okay that makes sense. I wouldn't mind the extra space.

If that's turned off, do you know if the game generates and caches shaders as you play? If so, does that also apply to games run outside of Steam?

Currently I'm just playing games like Hunt Showdown and Helldivers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

For Hunt Showdown specifically, I have tried skipping pre-caching before and the load into a level took so long that I got disconnected from the match. I recommend keeping it enabled for multiplayer games for that reason.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

well, I do have this one game I've tried to play, Enshrouded, it does do the shader compilation on it's own, in-game. The compiled shaders seem to persist between launches, reboots, etc, but not driver/game updates. So it stands to reason they are cached somewhere. As for where, not a clue.

And since if it's the game doing the compilation, I would assume non-steam games can do it too. Why wouldn't they?

But, ultimately, I don't know - just saying these are my observations and assumptions based on those. :P

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's usually disabled outside of steam. However you can use environment variables :

DXVK_ASYNC=1
DXVK_STATE_CACHE=true
DXVK_SHADER_CACHE=true
DXVK_STATE_PATH=
DXVK_STATE_CACHE_PATH=

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