Shader storage issues

[MaraDragon]

Hello, I play Warframe on Linux (Manjaro) and use Vulcan shaders. While the game can sometimes spend ages loading shaders, the actual issue is that it never seems to get rid of them. A few days ago I check my steam storage use and it had over 260gb of warframe shaders. Not the game, just the shaders. Warframe had somehow kept more shaders than my entire games library. And as I am on an SSD, I would prefer the game to not spend write cycles it does not need to.

I have since deleted them but as this was not the first time, I felt it needed mentioning. (Last time it was ~140gb of shaders)

No other game has these issues despite also using vulcan shaders

[Nekomian]

I don't have this issue on Windows, so I'd have to assume it's due to the way the game is emulating DX calls to Vulkan. It may be invalidating the shader cache on every single launch, meaning it just keeps compiling them for all materials it encounters every single play session. Usually this would be handled by the driver itself, so I'd update it if possible, but you can also manually set the shader cache to prevent it filling up like this as well by giving it a capped size. Something like 20gb should be more than sufficient to last a good while across many games.

[[DE]Purzzle]

Hiho!

Thank you for the report. We're currently investigating this shader issue.

Turning off "Enable Shader Pre-Caching" should resolve the issue for now until we got a working fix for it.

Cheers!

[EiraRozen]

Whether or not this bug is properly addressed, it means a lot to me for this not to be brushed off with "Linux is not a supported platform..." or worse. Thank you.

[Nekomian]

7 hours ago, EiraRozen said:

Whether or not this bug is properly addressed, it means a lot to me for this not to be brushed off with "Linux is not a supported platform..." or worse. Thank you.

This sounds like an issue with the vulkan translation implementation, which would not be something the devs of a specific game could fix. It's happening on multiple games, but here's just one as an example: 

It seems like a bug that would need to be fixed either within' DXVK (or VKD3D if you're running the DX12 version), Proton, or Steam that's making the system think the previously generated vulkan shader caches are all invalid. That said, if the issue is just storage space like the OP had, you can just delete the shader cache every few weeks (months?) until it is resolved, which is relatively minor.

Worth noting that if you're using an experimental / constantly changing build of something like Proton, it may naturally download new vulkan shaders from the collective pool of cached ones for your hardware and new version; some people noted that with this game specifically Steam downloads an excessive amount of them (which again would be a Steam issue, not something DE manages) and they disabled the option in Steam and rely on something called GPL (a vulkan extension that DXVK can use from what I can tell):