New Steam Client Beta adjusts the Vulkan pre-caching system and PipeWire for Linux

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.