For those whose Steam Deck SSDs are small or whose choices are paralyzed by which games to uninstall, there's a bit of good news: an upcoming update to Steam Deck's open-source video driver will reduce the size of the shader cache files on your Steam Deck, gaming handheld's shader cache files will shrink by about 60%, Valve confirmed to PC Gamer.

A recent report from Phoronix highlights an update included in Mesa 23.1 that will "re-implement the RADV pipeline cache based on the generic vk_pipeline_cache." Most importantly, Mesa is the OpenGL and Vulkan video driver to which Valve, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and others are contributing in a rare show of solidarity, and this change will affect the way the Vulkan driver currently in widespread use caches files This means that.

In the case of Steam decks, Valve creates large shader cache files for individual games that are delivered during the installation process, helping to improve performance and avoid the dreaded shader compilation stutter. The downside of these shader caches is the large amount of space they occupy: for large games, this can be several gigabytes. However, with the new Vulkan pipeline cache, shader caches are much smaller.

"Combined with a single file disk cache, the cache size can be reduced by ~60%," says the Gitlab overview. I emailed Pierre-Loup Griffais at Valve and confirmed that this applies to shader cache files on Steam Deck as well. He confirmed that "it is expected that the shader cache is already built," and Griffais said that for some games the cache file "will not change anything about the size of the transcoded video depot, which is marked in the UI as 'shader pre-caching'" because "it will He added that it would not shrink that dramatically.

So when should we expect this update to arrive?" We know that the stable version of Mesa driver 23.1 is expected to arrive in early May, and SteamOS 3.5, which includes an updated graphics driver, will be coming soon. We expect the two to coincide, with a beta release of SteamOS first, followed by a stable release early this summer. At least if you're in the northern hemisphere, it's going to be a good time to play Steam decks while rocking in a hammock.

If you're still running out of space after this update, check out our tutorial on upgrading your Steam Deck SSD (opens in a new tab).