In some situation shader pre-caching makes things worse rather than better: for example in my machine Borderlands 2 would take 10 minutes to update shaders at pretty much every game start even though I have a Gbps Internet connection.
Eventually it turned out that you really shouldn’t be running “Latest Proton” with it as any update to Proton would trigger a full update of the shader chache (or worse, local generation, which in my machine took hours). Of course, information about that shit was nowhere to be found, nor was the default configuration of that game under Linux setup to just run the game with a specific Proton version.
Switching shader pre-caching off also solved the problem, but to avoid the situation as you described of “shader translation at the time the shader is first used” causing unexpected slowdowns at bad time, when I figured out the that it was using “Latest proton” that was triggering full shader cache downloads I switched it all to use shader pre-chaching with a specific, fixed proton version.
All this to say that the was Steam does shader pre-caching isn’t a silver bullet - for some games it makes them near unplayable by default until you figure out the specific configuration changes needed (and, with at best many minutes before each game start actually succeeds, trial and error is a very slow and frustrating way to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it).
In some situation shader pre-caching makes things worse rather than better: for example in my machine Borderlands 2 would take 10 minutes to update shaders at pretty much every game start even though I have a Gbps Internet connection.
Eventually it turned out that you really shouldn’t be running “Latest Proton” with it as any update to Proton would trigger a full update of the shader chache (or worse, local generation, which in my machine took hours). Of course, information about that shit was nowhere to be found, nor was the default configuration of that game under Linux setup to just run the game with a specific Proton version.
Switching shader pre-caching off also solved the problem, but to avoid the situation as you described of “shader translation at the time the shader is first used” causing unexpected slowdowns at bad time, when I figured out the that it was using “Latest proton” that was triggering full shader cache downloads I switched it all to use shader pre-chaching with a specific, fixed proton version.
All this to say that the was Steam does shader pre-caching isn’t a silver bullet - for some games it makes them near unplayable by default until you figure out the specific configuration changes needed (and, with at best many minutes before each game start actually succeeds, trial and error is a very slow and frustrating way to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it).