Another day another Steam Client Beta release and this time Valve has done some adjustments to the Vulkan pre-caching system for Linux.
This pre-cache system is supposed to download and then process the shaders needed by a game before you launch it. The point is to have games perform well as soon as you hit play, instead of seeing constant stuttering while it builds up as you play. What Valve has now done is reduce the size of "Vulkan pre-caching datasets by splitting and versioning them according to Proton versions and graphics driver capabilities" and so they will start from scratch for the new Beta.
Additionally for Linux the recently introduced PipeWire desktop capture for Remote Play has been disabled by default, instead you can launch Steam with "-pipewire" if you wish to use it.
For all Steam users the Game File Verification has been improved so Steam will try to reuse as much of a corrupted file as possible to save download bandwidth and Steam Cloud got a fix for an infinite retry loop for failed background file downloads.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
So any application who utilise either of the two will also work on pipewire without alteration in their setup? Install pipewire and remove jack and pulse, and all should work as before only with potential latency benefits?
It's indicated on the pipewire homepage, but it's not 100% clear to me.
Last edited by Beamboom on 29 September 2021 at 9:09 am UTC
Quoting: BeamboomOk so let me see if I understand correctly: Is Pipewire a *drop-in* replacement for both pulseaudio and jack?
So any application who utilise either of the two will also work on pipewire without alteration in their setup? Install pipewire and remove jack and pulse, and all should work as before only with potential latency benefits?
I get that impression from the pipewire homepage, but it's not very explicit in their dsecriptions.
Yes, it's a drop-in replacement, though it's not that simple as just installing the one and removing the other. Fedora switched to PipeWire by default, other distros might require manual configuration. Steam works fine with PulseAudio so there is nothing to gain from tinkering with PipeWire.
Quoting: chelobakaSteam works fine with PulseAudio so there is nothing to gain from tinkering with PipeWire.The gain is rather to not have both jack and pulseaudio running, as many of us who also create music on Linux are more or less forced to do.
If one package could merge the use cases of both pulse and jack - as indeed seem to be their ambition - this is a major, major gain.
superboybot Sep 29, 2021
Quoting: BeamboomOk so let me see if I understand correctly: Is Pipewire a *drop-in* replacement for both pulseaudio and jack?
So any application who utilise either of the two will also work on pipewire without alteration in their setup? Install pipewire and remove jack and pulse, and all should work as before only with potential latency benefits?
It's indicated on the pipewire homepage, but it's not 100% clear to me.
Pipewire is compatible with pulsewire and jack specific applications with pipewire-pulse and pipewire-jack respectively (on Arch, may be different on other distros).
I run catia (Link through pipewire with the command pw-jack catia.
Quoting: superboybotPipewire is compatible with pulsewire and jack specific applications with pipewire-pulse and pipewire-jack respectively (on Arch, may be different on other distros).
Fantastic. I'll have to look into this. Thanks!
Quoting: ScrumplexPipeWire screensharing was probably disabled by default
... enabled ...
*edit*
To be clearer. :)
It was enabled before this version and has been disabled now.
Last edited by Eike on 29 September 2021 at 1:03 pm UTC
Quoting: ScrumplexFor those who are not aware: PipeWire screensharing was probably disabled by default, as everytime Steam started, it asked which screen to share. As there is currently no way to have it remember the user's choice it was probably disabled for now.
Yep. This is likely exactly why they DISABLED it by default. It was rather annoying to be prompted every single time.
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