Steam Deck to Reduce Space Taken up by Pre-Built Shader Caches in Upcoming Update

In an update planned for release in the future, the Steam Deck is slated to cut down on the space taken up by various games’ shader cache files. According to a report by Phoronix, the reduction of file size will be around 60%, returning quite a bit of space back to players.

The change is slated to come with update Mesa 23.1, bringing a change to the open source video driver used by the Steam Deck. These changes are made with contributions by Valve, AMD, Intel, and Microsoft, among other major companies.

According to PCGamer, Steam Deck developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has confirmed that Valve hopes to bring these changes to the Steam Deck and how it handles its pre-built shader caches.

“That’s our expectation for pre-built shader caches,” said Griffais, who also asked users to temper expectations, since changes to the shader cache won’t bring any changes to transcoded video depots, which are also included as part of the shader pre-caching process in the Steam Deck UI.

The Steam Deck has been seeing quite a bit of support, with a recent report revealing that 73 of Steam’s top 100 most-played games are supported on the handheld gaming platform. Valve also recently revealed a list of the 20 most-played games on the Steam Deck, which was headlined by titles like Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring, and Stardew Valley.