miss phant

What does it mean to “process shaders in real-time”?

Processing them as they’re loaded, quickly enough that there’s no noticeable frame drop. Usual LLVM based shader compilers aren’t fast enough for that but ACO is specifically written to compile shaders for AMD GPUs and makes this feasible.

Pre-compilation would in theory always yield higher 1% lows yes, but it’s not really worth the time hit anymore especially for games that constantly require a new cache to be built or have really long compilation times.

I think the one additional thing Steam does in that step is transcoding videos so they can be played back with Proton’s codec set but using something like Proton-GE, Proton-cachyos or Proton-EM solves this too.

Disclaimer: I don’t know how the deeply technical stuff of this works so this might not be exact.

If you’re talking about the Steam feature you can safely turn it off, any modern hardware running mesa radv (the default AMD vulkan driver in most distros) should be sufficient to process shaders in real-time thanks to ACO.

Waydroid works really well to run Android apps on mobile Linux, even for games. Doesn’t help for banking apps though as they’ll usually lock you out due to not passing Google safety checks.

I put off docker for a long time for similar reasons but what won me over is docker volumes and how easy they make it to migrate services to another machine without having to deal with all the different config/data paths.