Hello @echaskaris, this is Steam's background shader pre-cache processing doing its job as intended and is not specific to Left 4 Dead 2. If there is an issue here, it's that Steam says Validating... instead of Warming shader cache... or something similar.
@kisak-valve The problem here is not only what Steam is saying. The problem is that you can't start the game during that time, which is annyoing if you wait for e.g. a 5gb dowload of caches for borderlands 3. If the Shader-Download is shown in the download section, you can start the game from there, but most of the time the shader downloads do not show up there but you get the "validating.." at steam start which blocks you from using the game during that time.
This "heavy downloading/validating (whatever you call)" on every steam login for many games is just too much.
Every time I log in to steam it's my machine's freezing time for a few minutes. That said my machine barely freezes but steam will freeze it every time it starts. I have tons of game installed but some of them I haven't played for months and they still get validated one by one. This is super annoying.
Maybe allow people to enable pre-caching for individual games or plz lower the priority for those tasks. They work in the background but eat all the resources.
Nothing extracted yet.
There is also some heavy disk usage and it seems shader caches may be involved.
Ubuntu 20.04
Latest Steam beta