Valve Steam Deck update promises to finally make space for more games

Valve’s Steam Deck is getting a new driver update that could slash the size of your shader cache by “around 60%”. The update is expected to land on SteamOS in May.

Remember when Valve first announced the Steam Deck? It was a pretty exciting time. However, one confounding choice made by Valve was the choice to include a 64Gb model. Many games supported on Steam Deck easily blow past this. Meaning that if you’ve got one, it’s likely that you’re constantly dancing around uninstalling and reinstalling games. If you’re lucky enough to have replaced it with an SSD, you’ll probably have zero problems, on the other hand.

Regardless of what your Steam Deck storage situation is, a new update to the AMD Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) promises to shake up the way the Steam Deck handles its shader cache, as first reported by Phoronix. These are all the fancy effects that may need to be initially loaded in while playing the game. It’s stored on the device and called upon when the effect is in use. Not having a shader cache can lead to stuttering issues on certain game engines.

The reworked pipeline cache cuts down disk space by up to 60% in some cases, which could mean much more precious space for games on your Steam Deck.

When will the update be released?

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The Mesa 23.1 update is due to land around May, with a SteamOS update likely to follow suit. A smaller cache might make it easier for the Steam Deck to run titles, but there’s no mention of any improved Steam Deck performance in the full release notes for the change in the RADV driver quite yet.

Until then, Steam Deck users can still enjoy a multitude of new games, and we suggest that you take a look at our top Steam Deck games for April 2023.