On: Inside the Steam Deck's APU

[dagmx]

Nit: it does have the valve on-boarding game for it, but that doesn’t really change your point.

Also Valve do some steamdeck optimizations for every game via their shared shader cache. Which enables it to run a lot smoother than competing portable x86 systems.

[jorvi → dagmx]

> Also Valve do some steamdeck optimizations for every game via their shared shader cache

Isn’t the only purpose of this skipping shader (re)compiling?

As far as I understood it, they did it because compiling shaders both takes long on a handheld device and time is at a premium for handheld players. They don’t want to wait eight minutes for a shader compile.

[dagmx → jorvi]

There’s two places where shader precompilation helps:

1. Load times if you’re compiling them on stage load

2. Dynamically on asset load during gameplay.

The latter is one of the most major causes of stuttering in PC games, and Valves solution can greatly make a game feel smoother as a result.