Steam Beta Improves Its Vulkan Pre-Caching System, PipeWire Capture Now Opt-In

With the initial Steam Deck release quickly approaching, Valve continues to be quite busy on a variety of improvements to enhance their Steam Linux builds.

Hitting the Steam beta state tonight is an improved Vulkan pre-caching system. Steam's Vulkan pre-caching data-sets are now separated by Proton versions and graphics driver capabilities. In turn this should lead to smaller Vulkan cache sizes for users by avoiding the downloading of unnecessary/irrelevant caches while not impacting the performance goals of pre-caching. Though in transitioning to this new scheme, moving to this new beta will start from scratch with its downloads.

This same Steam beta update today does disable by default the PipeWire desktop capture support that was recently introduced. Those wishing to continue experimenting with PipeWire-based capturing for Steam Remote Play can use the "-pipewire" command-line argument.

Another change worth mentioning is improved game file verification logic where as when Steam now detects a game file has been corrupted, it will try to maximize the amount of the corrupted file that it can use in order to save bandwidth.

More details on today's Steam beta update via steamcommunity.com.