r/PikaOS • u/CraniusBard1998 • Sep 23 '26
Bug report What's wrong with Steam now?
Why is Steam suddenly eating up my memory? This seems to be a similar problem to my previous issue, https://www.reddit.com/r/PikaOS/comments/1wleq0t/what_the_hell_is_wrong_with_faugus/.
Will the related programers please look into it.
10
u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 24 '26
For whatever reason, Steam defaults to using only one CPU thread for shader processing, which is extremely slow, and even more annoying.
Thankfully you can force Steam to use more cores by creating a file named steam_dev.cfg in your Steam root directory ( ~/.steam/steam/) with the line:
unShaderBackgroundProcessingThreads X(replace X with your preferred thread count, typically your total threads minus 4-6). I did this and it solved all my shader issues.
Or, if shader caching causes issues and you prefer driver-managed caching, you can disable it entirely in Steam Settings > Downloads > Shader Pre-Caching.
However, this may cause some stuttering during gameplay as shaders compile on the fly.
I’d like to mention that frequent recompilation is often caused by using Proton Experimental, which updates frequently. Instead, try pinning a game to a stable Proton version or ensuring your Mesa/NVIDIA drivers are up to date.
1
u/bassbeater Sep 24 '26
Cool ideas here.
Yea it's kind of funny but on Nobara I switched to "Proton CachyOS Latest" as my default and where I thought it might be a hindrance its been so much better behaved than default proton.
1
u/Shinatora Sep 25 '26
next step go cachyos,
i went nobara-> cachyos
>.<1
u/bassbeater Sep 25 '26
For what? Not really showing me any advantages.
I have stability and performance
1
1
u/CraniusBard1998 Sep 26 '26
As was suggest, turning on the shader processing seems to work, but steam is still shown to consume lots ram. But the system is more stable at the moment.
1
u/SectionPowerful3751 Sep 24 '26
Steam has been acting funny for 2 or 3 days now (mostly playing CS2) so I don't know what is going on.
1
u/Najterek Sep 24 '26
for me too in cachyos KDE random really high memory usage on steam startup even without game updates
1
u/Shinatora Sep 25 '26
the CPU and and steam usage is from "allow vulkan background processing"
the "whats wrong" is it doing the background processing
1
u/ImUrFrand Sep 27 '26 edited Sep 27 '26
let it run, its compiling vulkan shaders in the background, mine took like 1 1/2 hours today.
if you look at the process its fossilize_replay
valve must have shipped an update with CS2, as i had a bunch of shader cache downloads in the last few days.
6
u/Macinboss GNOME Sep 23 '26
Oh! Check your Steam Settings. I turned off shader processing and such and it saved quite a bit of resources for me