I’m not really a gamer, so I’m just curious. I bought Borderlands 4 a few days ago and have been playing it on my Linux desktop every day since then, and every day I run it, it downloads another 2GB patch. Every. Day. I have to make sure I don’t start it when anyone else wants to use the WAN, and I have to start it a half-hour before I want to play, and I’m just curious if this is normal? Is it Linux? Is it Borderlands? Is it Steam? I’ve read that you can’t fully disable these updates under Steam, but you can if you buy through Gog; perhaps I made the wrong choice of platform.
I’m just a bit baffled at the idea that Borderlands is releasing a new 2GB patch (and it’s never less than 2GB) every 8 hours, or that every patch is necessary. I also know that Borderlands 3 did not have updates this frequently on the PS3. But I accept that, perhaps, I have something set up wrong. As I said, I’m not really a gamer.
Is this par for the course, now?
Edit
It seems disabling the shader caching fixed it. The first time I ran it, it took a long time to get through “resurrecting”, which is where it compiles shaders, but after that first time it doesn’t take much longer to get to playable, and I haven’t had it force download assets yet.
I see a couple of comments about the game itself being buggy. I’m several hours into the campaign (level 15) and haven’t had any issues. I have problem with the Linux bluetooth stack glitching on the PS4 controller (kernel CRC errors from the driver) but I haven’t had any crashes. I did encounter a glitch where a creature wasn’t being rendered, but moving around brought it back and nothing yet has affected gameplay. I don’t know if the creature glitch was related to disabling the cache, but… FWIW, the game seems to run as well as BL3 on my PS4.
Maybe it’s shaders. Try disabling shader pre-caching in the Steam settings under Downloads. This can be buggy.
That’s what someone else suggested, too. I’ve disabled it; I’ll find out tomorrow!
It’s definitely that cause I have shader precache disabled and have been playing the hell outta BL4 and get updates like maybe once a month as per the patch notes. It’s such a great game. Aside from running like shit, almost everything I hated about 3 has been resolved.
I wish i could play it but the most i could possibly pay for something so broken is like 25$
It runs really well on Arch and a Ryzen. The only issue I have is that I’m using a PS4 controller and bluez regularly has hissy fits; occasionally I’ll get a stream of CRC errors in dmesg and the controller goes caterwonky. But the game itself is just fine - I haven’t seen any issues I didn’t encounter in the rest of the series.
Why do you say it’s broken? I checked Proton compatibility but did no other research before getting it. Was it not stable before?
The game has poor performance being an unoptimized mess of ue5… But it’s not distracting enough for me to take away from the super fun gameplay well written characters and story. The humor actually hits. I’m really happy with it… Moreso once I got my new GPU cause framegen 2x was a must for me on this title
Ive played it myself and could barely get the game working on linux mint and had to refund it. But that’s been my experience with lots of games since switching to linux. Still never going back to windows though
Do you run with the drivers s mint includes or do you install the newer kernel and drivers cuz that could make a pretty big difference with that game. Specifically I’m on Nvidia and when they dropped the 590 drivers my FPS went up like 20 to 30%
I mean, it’s generally possible to make steam games run without steam
Is it? I thought a game purchased through Steam was managed by Steam. I’m sure there’s a way to launch it directly with Proton, but is it straightforward?
I’m talking about softwares that emulate steam to disable their DRMs. I know that they’re generally seen badly as they are linked to less legal ways to get games, but I’ve been using those to avoid having to run steam everytime I want to start a game, and I would say that it works in most cases. Especially useful when you cannot afford to have a reliable internet connection, and steam decides to be a bitch about it.
Even though Borderland could be one of these games with extra DRM protections, then yeah it might not work.
Obviously, GoG is generally better and makes everything much more straightforward.
I think this is just downloading the (new) shader sets see Github issue.
I’m using an AMD GPU and never had any issues with disabling the shader cache in Steam. Note that in some games it might be a bit stuttery in the very beginning then due to the shader compiler (ACO if using Mesa drivers with AMD) running in the background.
lol the classic “5 year old issue closed after 3 comments with no solve”
Oh, that’s interesting! Thanks! Yeah, I’m on AMD/Ryzen as well, and it runs smoothly after it finishes compiling the shaders. I’ll give that a try.
<digging furiously in settings for the shader cache setting>
For reference/others:
The setting is:
Settings -> Downloads -> Enable Shader Pre-caching
I would guess that you are using a newer version of proton that is updated frequently, because borderlands 1 doesn’t really have updates but if proton updates it will prompt a shader update for the games using it. You could try to just use an order version in the game properties, chances are with an older game there isn’t much performance difference anyway.
This is about borderlands 4, not 1, but yes it’s probably shader-related.
I think his point is even games with no updates anymore can have frequent shader updates if using a proton version that is being rapidly updated. Like Proton experimental.
If it runs with say proton 10 then he should see less frequent updates. From the sounds of it, that game runs badly in general so older proton might not work out.
Would mess with the shader settings as other people have mentioned, but you can also limit the bandwidth steam downloads use in the settings if you’re worried about other people on your network
