Processing vulkan shaders every time I launch a game

[Lemon-Lime]

I've been having the following issue. Every time I open a game up, I
have to wait for "Processing vulkan shaders" to end.
This process can take several minutes, if not hours.

However, after the first time you open a game up, the "Processing vulkan
shaders" gets considerably faster; taking only minutes.

I was unable to find any sort of documentation on what that "Processing"
even is. Only vague reddit threads/steam threads, namely:
-
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/3279194062595915652/
-
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/12eib4y/processing_vulkan_shaders_every_time/

However, there are no concrete answers, only hypothesis and guesses. The
steam thread was even closed by a valve employee, yet I saw no concrete
answers.

My question is, what are those shaders? Why do you have to process them
every time? Can't they be saved on the filesystem?

Plus, I saw that there is a proton ebuild (nice!)
https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-emulation/wine-proton.
What's the purpose of this ebuild?
According to Valve, you can use your own proton build in steam
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561.

[papu]

deactivate and all will be fine again!

i used to use that but is a trash , it's very much fast without than with just try

shaders it suppose to be pre-load grafics that helps to game later, but in my experience it's useless

steam settings----downloads----shader pre-caching---all switched off
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--so ~amd64 & openrc --cpu 7700 non-x --ram 2x16GB --gpu RX 470

[Lemon-Lime]

[steve_v]

Pre-launch "shader processing" exists to reduce in-game framerate drops caused by on-demand shader compilation (and translation from DX to Vulkan). IIRC steam enables it by default when using proton, some games implement similar functionality internally as well.
Shader caching will still take place regardless of whether it's enabled or not, the difference is in whether shaders are compiled and cached at startup or when they're needed. In the past there were some deficiencies in wine/dxvk handling of shader compilation and disk caches, which is likely why steam added this.

Much improvement has been made to both shader compile performance (see dxvk-async, dxvk readme and 2.1 release notes, mesa enabling gpl) and on-disk cache management of late, so unless you're actually suffering from shader compile "stutters" in-game it's likely no longer needed and quite safe to disable.
Steam's shader precaching can even be counterproductive in some cases, as it may interfere with (causing double-caching / evictions) DXVK caching.

As to what a shader is... you could just ask wikipedia or some other reputable source instead of grubbing about in the garbage dump of reddit and steam comments.
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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times is Official GNOME Policy.

[RbMlWIzard]