Steam Enables Shader-Pre-Caching
I did not realize this feature would need to make the news, as it was introduced back in November already? But to improve on load times Steam enabled Shader-Pre-Caching, as it is now widely reported on the web.
By caching chaders (and both AMD and Nvidia do this as well already) your load times could be reduced, as well as preventing load times in game and thus a stutter or two. The shader Pre-Caching can be switched on and off in the settings of Steam under "Shader Pre-Caching". As per default , the feature is now enabled. You can also check out how many megabytes of pre-compiled shaders are used. It is unclear at the moment whether even Vulkan and OpenGL games support the feature as games like Doom and Wolfenstein did absolutely nothing to my pre-chache count? perhaps the games need to actively support the feature.
Steam's shader pre-caching is in line with the shader cache features of AMD and Nvidia. While Steam preloads the shaders, GeForce and Radeon graphics cards can save them after the first game start and reuse them the next time they start up. The new update new update now offers support for OpenGL and Vulkan games in combo with the Steam client.
General
- New feature: Shader Pre-Caching. Whenever possible, depending on hardware and driver support, Steam can download pre-compiled shaders for your specific video card. This reduces load times and in-game stuttering during the first few launches of OpenGL- and Vulkan-based games on supported hardware. This feature may use a small amount of additional bandwidth as Steam uploads and analyzes a shader usage report after each run of the game. The feature can be disabled via a new entry in the Settings dialog.
- Fixed issues with full-screen mode not scaling video content correctly in the Steam Client
- Fixed a UI issue that made it difficult to install new games if a previous installation dialog box was still active
- Fixed several rare crashes and hangs reported by customers
- Updated web views to Chromium v62.0.3202.62
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How many caches are there now? The driver caches shaders, and many games cache shaders too. Now Steam joins in and caches them a third time.
How many caches do we need? :p
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I did not realize this feature would need to make the news, as it was introduced back in November already? But to improve on load times Steam enabled Shader-Pre-Caching, as it is now widely reported...
Steam Enables Shader-Pre-Caching
November 15th for the Steam client beta builds, however it appears this only made it into the stable version yesterday.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/?feed=steam_client
As for the beta I think the current build from yesterday is the new break point from the stable build so just a fix for VR mode currently.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta#announcements
EDIT: No it's actually in the stable build too so they're about identical for now.

EDIT: November 7th, interesting how the notes in the new public build doesn't make any mention on it only being Nvidia though which I think is still in effect.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta#announcements?p=3
(And depending on the driver installed, thus why those GLRuntimeQuery exe files run whenever Steam is started or so I'm guessing though it could also have a purpose for troubleshooting the Chromium web component and possible hardware acceleration for that.)
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Previously, 37 MB, but now 44 MB pre-cached. Where's the location file?
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I must say this is a nice useful setting if you loading big textures. Also going from my normal ssd to the Samsung Evo 960 was a big increase in loading times.
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How many caches are there now? The driver caches shaders, and many games cache shaders too. Now Steam joins in and caches them a third time.
How many caches do we need?