Valve is about to slash the file sizes of the Steam Deck's SSD-hogging shader caches in half

Heroic Game Launcher running on a Steam Deck

Here's some exciting news for those of us with smaller Steam Deck SSDs or choice paralysis over what games to uninstall. A forthcoming update to the Steam Deck's open source video driver will shrink the gaming handheld's shader cache files by approximately 60%, Valve has confirmed to PC Gamer. 

A recent report on Phoronix highlighted an update coming in Mesa 23.1, which "re-implements the RADV pipeline cache based on the common vk_pipeline_cache." There are probably a whole bunch of words in that sentence that don't mean much to you—most importantly, Mesa is an OpenGL and Vulkan video driver that Valve, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and others contribute to in a rare act of unity, and this change affects how the now widely used Vulkan driver caches files.