this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Linux Gaming
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Yeah. Good point. The problem I see with that is that SOMEONE has to store the shader caches that you download. With some games, it's megabytes and some games it's gigabytes. Also, the shaders are different for different hardware configurations. Who is going to not only store, but share all of this data when only a small portion of people donate to FOSS? Steam, gets a portion of the sale, and moving people to Linux is a far sight goal that they are monetarily incentivized to help towards.
In theory this problem is already "solved" with torrents.
True, but complex and probably a tad unrealistic. My old days of using torrents taught me that people don't typically seed.
Ignoring that, if you automatically download torrents and start seeding them many people wouldn't understand them and will have their internet overwhelmed and blame Linux, or Google it and come to the conclusion to "turn off the seeding feature".
Also, Shader Caches get changed/updated CONSTANTLY. When I first got my Steam Deck, I was getting Shader Caches updates every time I turned it on for nearly every game. That has slowed down a lot but torrents specifically wouldn't be the best solution for something that changes frequently. You can re-check so that you can just only download new caches with the latest torrent. But the re-check can be computationally expensive as well.
Idk the answer and I love the idea of P2P. But, we'd have to be careful to implement it well.
I wonder if a program could be built that would do it.
A program will not fix it. The problem is shader caches need to be stored. Storage costs money. Who is going to pay to store all of them?
Maybe it could be like a P2P system but that would add a whole lot of complexity!
I was thinking a program that would pull, create, and store all the shader cache of a game locally on the system.
Pull from where?
Magicland, I suppose. I guess it would need to spoof that it's a steam os installed game in order to download the cache from valves server and then move the cache over to the appropriate folder for the game. I guess it would be a lot of work for each game, since the cache folder isn't going to be named the same and in the same spot.
Even then, the shaders for steam deck wouldn't work on other devices with different GPU architecture. I think it might require the same CPU architure as well. But, I'm not confident on the second part.
I wasn't talking about other devices. Just the steam deck. If it's a game bought through steam you get the pre-cache files. If it's a game you're playing on the SD, but was purchased/obtained outside of steam you can still play it but you won't have the pre-cache files to use.
Ah