Shaders taking up too much space on your 64GB? Here's a fix

[onibaku]

Edit: it seems that there are pretty heavy performance drops when doing this, at least with Forza Horizon 5.

I came across this fix on reddit, thought I'd share it here as well. Credits to albynomonk and nemnapos. This will free up approx 30gb on ur internal drive and always save shader files to ur microsd card! If you've been using multiple SD cards then it gets a bit more complicated as you should only transfer compatdata and shaders for the games that are installed on that particular SD card. I suppose you COULD drag all files from compatdata and shadercache but it'd be a waste of space.

This is a great fix for people that dont want to change their SSDs

"Go to Desktop Mode

Drag the compatdata and shader cache folders from your SSD to your microSD card and hit "Move". Let them copy over.

Drag the compatdata and shader cache folders from your microSD card to your SSD (the same location you moved them from) and hit "Link".

It's SUPER easy to do, and works like a charm."


Link to thread:

 

[subcon959]

No one in the reddit thread mentioned performance drops, so is that just your own experience?

It would be interesting as everyone keeps saying there's no difference between SD and SSD for gaming.

 

[onibaku]

No one in the reddit thread mentioned performance drops, so is that just your own experience?

It would be interesting as everyone keeps saying there's no difference between SD and SSD for gaming.

Yeah i didnt see any mention of that either but i had huge performance drops on Forza Horizon 5, it was completely unplayable. It wouldnt even load on GE Proton7-14 or proton experimental. It would load on steamplay's default proton (7.0.1 in my case) but a lot of stutter rendering it completely unplayable, crashing after a few min.

I moved the compatdata and shader files back to the ssd and it ran fine (on GE Proton7-14). It still crashed after maybe 2-3 hours of gameplay but was a smooth experience otherwise.

It crashed very frequently on experimental and 7.0.1 (every 20-30min).

Just to note that the actual install was on the microsd card the entire time, this only had to do with moving compatdata and shader files to the microsd card. Im also using a Sandisk Extreme Pro Microsd card.

 

[Xzi]

No one in the reddit thread mentioned performance drops, so is that just your own experience?

It would be interesting as everyone keeps saying there's no difference between SD and SSD for gaming.

It's one thing installing games on an mSD, you might add five to ten seconds loading time. The shaders for a AAA game, however, are going to be randomly read constantly while the game is running, rather than just on initial loads. An mSD wouldn't be able to keep up.

 

[onibaku]

Yeah unfortunately it doesn't seem like a good permanent fix, I'll probably install a 512gb ssd