The latest update for the Steam software brought with it an important new addition for the quality of life of gamers under the Linux or Windows suns everywhere: persistent shader caches for games. In the latest change-log, users are treated to the following message: "New feature: Shader Pre-Caching. Whenever possible, depending on hardware and driver support, Steam can download pre-compiled shaders for your specific video card. This reduces load times and in-game stuttering during the first few launches of OpenGL- and Vulkan-based games on supported hardware. This feature may use a small amount of additional bandwidth as Steam uploads and analyzes a shader usage report after each run of the game. The feature can be disabled via a new entry in the Settings dialog.

Under Steam Settings, you'll find a new Shader Pre-Caching item. The description reads as follows: "Shader Pre-Caching allows Steam to download pre-compiled GPU shaders matching your system configuration. This allows Vulkan and OpenGL games to load faster and improve framerate stability during gameplay. If enabled, Steam will collect shaders from your system when needed. Enabling this feature may slightly increase disk and bandwidth usage."There's also a handy counter for you to know exactly how many MB are being used by the Shader Pre-Caching feature. If you have a capped bandwidth internet service, however, you'd do well to pay particular attention to this feature, lest it eats through your available data cap. However, users should be met with decreased loading times, and a more stable framerate as instances where shaders must be loaded in new areas will be reduced. All in all, it's always better to actually have the option to enable this feature than not having it altogether.

Shader Pre-Caching is nothing new, and is even part of Microsoft's DX12 specification. However, it would seem that this Windows feature was missing enough code for OpenGL and Vulkan games that Steam decided to take the matter into their own hands through this baking-in in the Steam client. At the same time, with DX12 games dwindling in number and becoming few and far between with sometimes questionable games over their previous incarnations, the Steam Shader Pre-Caching stands to pick up the shader cache slack in older API's.