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This is some thrilling information for these of us with smaller Steam Deck SSDs or selection paralysis over what video games to uninstall. A forthcoming replace to the Steam Deck’s open supply video driver will shrink the gaming handheld’s shader cache recordsdata by roughly 60%, Valve has confirmed to PC Gamer.
A current report on Phoronix highlighted an replace coming in Mesa 23.1, which “re-implements the RADV pipeline cache based mostly on the widespread vk_pipeline_cache.” There are most likely an entire bunch of phrases in that sentence that do not imply a lot to you—most significantly, Mesa is an OpenGL and Vulkan video driver that Valve, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and others contribute to in a uncommon act of unity, and this transformation impacts how the now broadly used Vulkan driver caches recordsdata.
Within the Steam Deck’s case, Valve has created large shader cache recordsdata for particular person video games which can be delivered in the course of the set up course of, bettering efficiency and serving to keep away from the dreaded shader compilation stutter. The draw back to those shader caches is how a lot area they take up: probably a number of gigabytes for bigger video games. With the brand new Vulkan pipeline cache, nevertheless, they’re about to get quite a bit smaller.
“Together with single-file disk-cache, this reduces the cache measurement by ~60%,” the abstract on Gitlab says. I emailed Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais to substantiate this utilized to the shader cache recordsdata on the Steam Deck. “That is our expectation for pre-built shader caches,” he confirmed. Griffais did add that some video games will not see their cache recordsdata shrink fairly so dramatically, as a result of the replace “Will not change something for the scale of transcoded video depots, that are additionally marked ‘shader pre-caching’ within the UI.”
So when ought to we anticipate this replace to reach? The secure model of Mesa driver 23.1 is predicted to land in early Could, and we all know that SteamOS 3.5 can be on its method quickly, together with a graphics driver replace. I anticipate these two issues will coincide, first in a beta SteamOS launch after which in a secure launch early this summer season. It’ll be season to hang around in a hammock and play your Steam Deck, at the least for those who’re within the northern hemisphere.
If you happen to anticipate you may nonetheless be tight on area even after this replace, although, here is our walkthrough for upgrading your Steam Deck SSD (opens in new tab).
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