ValveSoftware
Extremely long shader compilation times
Using Proton Experimental as my default proton version, I'm seeing EXTREMELY long shader compilation times. I'm talking over an hour for certain games. Deadlock takes 15 minutes and re-compiles every time there's an update. I'm trying to run Once Human right now and it's been compiling shaders for 45 minutes and it's only at 57%.
I have a Ryzen 3700X and 32GB of RAM, along with 7900XT. I can compile the Cosmic desktop environment from source code faster than I can most of these shaders. I believe there's something wrong with Proton and how it's handling the compilation of shaders. If this is unusual or there's anything I can do to improve the situation, I'd love to know.
Hello @Daktyl198, this reads like Steam's shader pre-cache subsystem, which is run through Fossilize, not Proton, so I've transferred this issue to the Fossilize issue tracker.
You are correct. I had not looked at the process name, and assumed the two were related. Thank you for the assistance.
Can confirm that Deadlock frequently needs to recompile shaders and takes a long time too. Even just skipping the compile takes a minute.
I'm having a similar issue with Overwatch 2. It looks like when pressing "play" to start the game only a single thread of fossilize pops up, where I would prefer to have as many as reasonable on my CPU.
The background process option does this with an option in steam_dev.cfg, "unShaderBackgroundProcessingThreads", where supplying an amount of threads after it will greatly speed up the background process, but only the background one.
I think Fossilize implemented a protocol channel which will remove all pressure restrictions if fossilize should work in foreground. I wonder if that is properly used by the Steam client if you press play.
