Vulkan Shader Processing causes memory shortage

Hi everyone,

Relatively new, but I do have an issue I’m trying to solve.
With only 1 game affected (so far) Arc Raiders, it seems each time I need to process shaders following a game update, it does it’s usual maxing of CPU, but then the RAM usage steadily climbs once it’s at 100%, causing the Kernal to kill the Steam Application due to a memory shortage.

This issue has persisted through at least a couple of the CachyOS updates, and being relatively new to Linux as a whole, I’m not sure where else to stick my nose.
The game typically will launch after I reload steam, but on occasion it has to process the shaders a second time, and again, steam is closed out by the kernal.

No other game presents this issue.
System specs below:
AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
32GB DDR5 6400Mhz RAM
nVidia RTX 4070

Game is launched using Cachy’s default compatibility in Steam.

Any help is appreciated, please let me know if any other details need to be shared.

Welcome to the forum,

If it’s just after compiling shaders for Arc Raiders, and no other game, it’s probably a Proton issue/memory leak. You wrote a great rundown in your post and thanks for reporting but I unfortunately feel like Proton is the source, and not Arch/CachyOS (assuming it only happens with Arc Raiders).

But perhaps you could try running it with Steam’s Proton in the compatibility menu instead of Proton-CachyOS to see if it’s due to CachyOS’ proton optimizations. Then we’re running Valve’s officially supported version of Proton that we’re allowed to open issues on Github for

It’s advised to disable Steam’s shader pre-caching feature when utilizing Proton-CachyOS, Proton-GE, or Proton-EM. They already contain all the necessary codecs to play videos inside games, and nowadays, a relatively modern GPU-CPU combo should be more than capable of dealing with compiling shaders in-game.

Note

It’s highly recommended to increase your maximum shader cache size after disabling shader pre-caching on Steam.

Info on how to do this is available in the wiki link provided.

Alright, thank you both for the advice! I’ll explore those avenues and see what the result is. Life has gotten in the way of gaming currently (curse you responsibilities) so I’ll provide an update when I can.

I`ve been having the same issue, but in satisfactory.