im no game developer but i used to make custom shader mods for APB and i got quite experienced with it. facts: shader language is actually called hlsl or high level shader language hlsl only has access to visual data of the pixel, depth/rgb/transparency and some game var data using precompiled shaders is a giant time safer nvidia shader cache requires user to compile them at least once good example of the shaders hackability is the reshade mods for games or drawing a custom crosshair to a game there is zero security concers, even if it was posible to code malware in hlsl, the code would run inside the gpu games sandbox, cannot access the cpu/ram/storage/processes/drivers....

Neo Cyrus:

Open GL and Vulkan... that applies to all of none of my Steam library.

You need Doom in your life :P

pittiez:

there is zero security concers

i guarantee you i could write something to hard lock the exe at least, & i can hardly code properly. i admit its extremely unlikely for this to actually come up & cause an issue for anybody, but ive poked enough holes in the steam API itself that im personally uncomfortable with the prospect. the only thing ill use steam cloud for is my profile & game saves. not trying to harp on about this, so ill shut up now. its a neat feature, just poorly implemented.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

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

I am glad you managed to cache this story.......yeah i know, just horrible in every way, i think i just set the english language back 600 years, i'l get me coat. lol

__hollywood|meo:

like authentication cant be spoofed? meanwhile idk wat your definition of safe is, but if its an inability to execute harmful or malicious instruction sets...then no, a shader cache is not safe. is this a concern for the average user? is steam cloud likely to be compromised? hell no. that doesnt change my viewpoint, however

It is safe since shaders lacks of the semantics to do that. It is the driver job to state what the driver can see and it's the runtime (if present, ie no open-gl job what the driver will tell the GPU. What does this mean? A GPU cannot see what password you are typing, doesn't matter if the GUI where you type the password is accelerated with the GPU.