Ready for another huge Steam Festival? It shall be returning with the Steam Game Festival, February 2021 edition. Plus there's a fresh Steam Beta that Linux users will want to try out.
For the Steam Game Festival it goes live on February 3 at 10AM PT / 6PM UTC. Much like the previous festivals, it's all about giving developers a chance to showcase their upcoming games. There's going to be tons of demos across various genres for you to try, plus there will also be livestreams where developers will talk about various topics surrounding their games from development to live gameplay.
Direct Link
As usual, we shall be going over to find all the Linux demos worth taking a look at so be sure to come back to GamingOnLinux on February 3 to see what we liked.
You can follow the event page here.
Now onto something related: there's a fresh Steam Client Beta available as of January 30 which polishes up the shader cache and processing system on Steam. This is the feature that is supposed to make games smoother, so it's worth giving it another go. Here's the changelog:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
- Fixed a bug where processing Vulkan shaders would run out of memory on NVIDIA Pascal cards and older
- Re-enabled Vulkan shader processing on NVIDIA
- Fixed a bug where NVIDIA shader cache files above 2GB couldn't be loaded
- Greatly improved memory usage and disk I/O when processing NVIDIA cache files (requires driver 460.x or newer)
- Updated to latest Fossilize, picking up some general memory usage improvements
slaapliedje Jan 30, 2021
RickAndTired Jan 30, 2021
How intensive have people found the shader caching to be? On the AtariVCS with Debian installed it takes a really long time to process. Sure it isn't a power hkuse, but I feel it is more about the APU in that than the CPU. Does it eat VRAM?
All 12 cores on my Ryzen 2600 run at 100% for multiple minutes during the shader caching for me
TheRiddick Jan 30, 2021
Might move back to Mesa20.3 from 21-dev, not much else can be done.
slaapliedje Jan 31, 2021
Holy crap!How intensive have people found the shader caching to be? On the AtariVCS with Debian installed it takes a really long time to process. Sure it isn't a power hkuse, but I feel it is more about the APU in that than the CPU. Does it eat VRAM?
All 12 cores on my Ryzen 2600 run at 100% for multiple minutes during the shader caching for me
It doesn't even really seem to kick the fan up on the VCS, but it only has 2 cores / 2 hyperthreaded from my understanding.
Anyone with an AMD graphics chip want to try out Sunset Overdrive? It was a slideshow on the VCS, and initially ran terrible on even my pimped machine (i9-9900k w/ 2080 RTX). Finally became a bit playable later, but I think the engine isn't very well optimized as it still randomly drops to single digit frames. Game was annoying so I stop playing, but maybe I didn't play long enough for it to be more open.
slaapliedje Jan 31, 2021
Haven't experience much shader caching on my 6800XT, but there are other issues I'm facing with proton game performance. Problems which don't exist on the windows10 AMD driver now (they did in the past).Ha, at this point I keep looking to see if I can find either a 6800 or 6900 ot 3080 for sale and can't find any at all. Though since I have gotten nvidia cards for years, I will probably get that the 3080 and call it a day, but lack of supply by either of them have forced me to linger on with my 980 and 2080.
Might move back to Mesa20.3 from 21-dev, not much else can be done.
I just switched over to Mint XFCE and Steam is downloading all the shaders even as I write this. Maybe this new update'll fix it? One always hopes.
Regarding the "Festival," I know all I need to know about what's next. It's Valheim into Early Access. Two copies please, thank you very much.
Last edited by Nanobang on 1 February 2021 at 12:53 pm UTC
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