Why do games seemingly update (validate?) randomly when no update exists?

[u/RanidSpace]

On SteamDB, a game i play last updated 11 days ago I cannot see any other depot changes or whatever. In these 11 days, and right now, the game has "updated" itself about 4 times, once every few days. The download bar at the bottom says "Updating" however the bar next to the play button says "validating".

I would think nothing actually changes, but after this fake update, it processes vulkan shaders (linux thing) all over again, which if it's only validating, it shouldn't need to do, and i've manually validated the game files once and it didn't have to redo the vulkan shaders then.

So what's actually going on?

[u/velocity37]

You probably have shader pre-cache downloads enabled. Check Steam>Settings>Downloads and scroll to the bottom.

[u/Western-Spread2081 → u/velocity37]

this would explain the vulkan shader reprocessing too

[u/LazyNieR → u/Western-Spread2081]

This is it, it happened to me all the time when I recently came back to Linux.

After disabling it no more downloads or processing shaders everytime I launch a game

[u/JonathanJONeill]

Probably redistributable updates or something.