In this video I cover how to change the amount of CPU cores and threads used by Steam for compiling shaders in the background. You may have noticed that when you launch a game in Steam using Proton, a window may appear stating that it is compiling shaders. It is possible to reduce the overall time it takes to compile these shaders if you allow them to compile in the background whilst Steam is open. Step 1. Enable Background Shader Pre-Caching. Open Steam, and navigate to Steam / Settings / Downloads and at the bottom will be the Shader Pre-Caching section. In this section, simply toggle on both “Enable Shader Pre-Caching" and “Allow background processing of Vulkan shaders.” However, to my knowledge, by default, this will only uses a single CPU core or two threads, but it is possible to specify how many CPU threads Steam should should be using for background shader compilation. Step 2. Change CPU / Threads Used By Steam For Background Shader Compilation First, open your file browser, enable hidden files, and navigate to: .local/share/Steam/ Inside this directory, create a new file called steam_dev.cfg and inside this file, type the following. Alternatively for Ubuntu based distributions, the location instead will be: .steam/debian-installation unShaderBackgroundProcessingThreads 10 The number representing how many CPU threads, you want Steam to use for background shader compilation. Once you have made your selection, save the file and restart Steam. Now any games that require any shader compilation in Steam will compile significantly faster. #steam #linuxgaming #proton Social Media Links Discord - https://discord.gg/3SxGk3WG2D Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Intelligent-Gaming-101640054531594 Mastodon - https://mastodon.social/@Intelligentgaming Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/IntelligentGaming2020/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/inspectorgecko