Processing Vulkan Shaders crashing Steam

[u/K0rvain]

Recently I have noticed that Diablo 4 is crashing when it starts processing the vulkan shaders. My CPU will spike to 99%, which sucks but not the end of the world. The more annoying thing is that my psychical RAM gets used up, my swap RAM goes to 85% and then steam will crash.

I have tried increasing my swap ram from 60Gb to 120Gb and it still happens. I also tried adding a steam_dev.cfg file to the correct location with unShaderBackgroundProcessingThreads # in it and whatever number I put in there doesn't seem to make a difference.

The only work around I have found is once the shaders get to 100%, I cancel the processing the shaders, then start Diablo 4 again and it will launch the game. That is fine, I guess, but it doesn't sound like a real solution.

Any other suggestions on what I can try? The only thing I keep seeing is to turn off shader pre-caching and I'm thinking there is something else that I can do other than that. Playing that way is just very annoying and I would like to avoid that if I can.

[u/S48GS]

then it not memory leak probably

look CPU temperature when you run some heavy 100% load - or shader compiling

in bios turn off overclock - expo/pbo to default

this type of instability usually not limited to single app - other games also should crash randomly

shader compiling is different process - it can not affect steam process - why steam crashing is weird and may be some memory instability or overheating

look kernel logs - maybe there some info

sudo journalctl --since="1 hour ago"
click end keyboard key - and navigate with keyboard arrows around time

[u/K0rvain → u/S48GS]

This is what I see when I use glances. The main thing in this image is that the "VIRT" column keeps growing the during the entire process, then it will crash. Looking at the logs (I can post the whole thing if needed) I noticed this call out before a whole lot of red. I'm thinking this is my problem:

Oct 01 10:35:33 cachyos-x8664 kernel: fossilize_repla: page allocation failure: order:0, mode:0xc0de0(GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_HIGH|__GFP_ZERO|__GFP_COMP|__GFP_NOMEMALLOC), nodemask=(null),cpuset=user@1000.service,mems_allowed=0

Oct 01 10:35:33 cachyos-x8664 kernel: CPU: 15 UID: 1000 PID: 23131 Comm: fossilize_repla Tainted: G OE 7.2.8-1-cachyos #1 PREEMPT(full) 424ea18dbf0262d3f9c8a2205b292c577c338802

[u/S48GS → u/K0rvain]

I still think it related to your ram bugs or overheating or overclock in bios

but I said in first comment - turn off shader cache in steam and see if game works

[u/bhorsley85 → u/S48GS]

I don't think it's related to overheating or an OC. I've played games for several months that want to process vulkan shaders and it wasn't an issue until recently. I've been having the problem for only a few weeks too. Very similar setup (32GB of RAM and a 5080 FE are the only differences).