Depends on the game

It's expanding on the existing cache, this will eventually become rarer to see as the cache for each game becomes more comprehensive and is downloaded upon installation with the rest of the game files.

some games had (or still have) this issue in linux way before the deck. report it and or ask in the forums about the affected game, and maybe you will help solving it.

Originally posted by Nathan:

It's expanding on the existing cache, this will eventually become rarer to see as the cache for each game becomes more comprehensive and is downloaded upon installation with the rest of the game files.

I would believe this, if it wasn't for the fact that spyro reignited trilogy has consistently wanted to download 2.5gb everytime I reboot. Its the same size everytime, which leads me to believe it's deleting this cache. Unless its rewriting it every single time, which if thats the case, I think thats dumb but thats beyond my scope of knowledge.

yeah this is a very annoying and expensive bug as my steam deck downloads 10GBs of the same files on every power ons so 6 boots use up my entire mobile monthly plan data then after that I start getting charged per mb of data used.

Lets hope they fix this soon so I can actually use my steamdeck when I am away from the house and using my phone for mobile data so I can run those even games that seem to need to login on each startup even for single player use.

Edit: that and its also going to kill the 64GB steamdecks built in storage at somepoint far sooner than you would expect when it hits the devices hard limit for data writes.

So lets hope it get fixed before people start needing to replace SSD's and micro SSD card as a result of the excessive data writing.

Yeah, i have the same issue. As far as I can tell, it is not "expanding on an existing cache" or updating the shaders after a game is patched. It is redownloading the complete pre-compiled shaders for every game I have installed every time I do a complete power down and then power it back up. It does not seem to do it when I put the deck to sleep and wake it up.

I guess you could always just disable shader precache after you download it once and only turn it on when you download a new game. It may be a pain but that’s what I’m testing out now just to save storage.

I'm seeing the same thing, quite annoying to have to redownload all the time, I've tried the beta build and it's the same

This needs to stop already it's been reported for at least half a year and continues to be an issue with fifty pages of comments in this thread alone. I have tried to get support through Steam but they never even bother to reply.

This is very annoying, also going on on Ubuntu Linux 2GB update every day on cs2.

Originally posted by Harryo:

This is very annoying, also going on on Ubuntu Linux 2GB update every day on cs2.

cs2 is an game in active development. Pretty understandable...

I also have the same issue with the walking dead telltale game series. Every single day I have to download an 8.6GB shader cache and it gets old so fast. What is even worse is that it glitches up the download UI. If I clear the downloads list while it is downloading, it will disappear from the list, but still be downloading. Then I can't even pause or continue the download at all unless I have another download in schedule to swap it with.

Originally posted by Skyro468:

If I clear the downloads list while it is downloading, it will disappear from the list, but still be downloading. Then I can't even pause or continue the download at all unless I have another download in schedule to swap it with.

this has been an issue on linux steam client for a VERY long time.

Originally posted by Skyro468:

I also have the same issue with the walking dead telltale game series. Every single day I have to download an 8.6GB shader cache and it gets old so fast. What is even worse is that it glitches up the download UI. If I clear the downloads list while it is downloading, it will disappear from the list, but still be downloading. Then I can't even pause or continue the download at all unless I have another download in schedule to swap it with.

Go into Desktop Mode and disable the shader downloads if it bothers you.