dear god almighty, there needs to be UX for fossilize_replay eating my CPU
Baffling too, I sat here and listening to it ramp my laptop fans, eat my CPU, and the second I restart Steam it disappears and hasn't come back.
Not great. not great.
This isn't okay.
Hello @colemickens, fossilize_replay (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Fossilize) takes a collection of hardware independent shaders and runs it through your video driver so that the video driver's on-disk shader cache has been warmed up from seeing those shaders in advance. The general purpose is to reduce stutter from compiling shaders on demand in the middle of gameplay.
This is managed by Steam, not Proton, and you have control over this behavior of Steam at Steam -> Settings -> Downloads -> Allow background processing of Vulkan shaders. That tells Steam if it's allowed to work ahead when there isn't a game running.
Closing as not a Proton issue.
Related: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9405
That's a very detailed, kind, helpful answer. Thank you so much @kisak-valve :).
Sorry if this is the wrong place for this but I don't know what on Earth fozzilize-replay is, but if Valve/Steam/Proton folks had any sense, there would be some sort of an explanation for this process that seems to eat 17-20% of my CPU when I just happen to have Steam open. Even for a full on hour.