The first time a new player on Linux tries to play Apex Legends it can be a horrible experience. From occasional stuttering when a new shader is cached, to complete freezes and crashes as hundred or thousands of new shaders a processed. These problems also plauge long time Apex Legends on Linux players as each new map update has a huge impact on game performance requiring re-rendering of shaders. This repository will hopefully become a large community effort to make Apex Legends on Linux a smooth and enjoyable experience for everyone.
Apex Legends uses the Direct3D 11 rendering engine which is not supported on Linux. Instead, Proton uses DXVK to provide a Vulkan-based implementation of D3D11 and 10. While this works great for most games, some have a lot of shaders that need to be accessed while you play the game. The Valve team handles most of the pre-caching of these shaders from community sourced files, but they do not distribute this one file which assists with accessing these pre-cached shaders. A more detailed explaination of what goes on behind the scenes can be found in this r/linux_gaming thread.
Instead of each player having to drop in multiple times with unplayable rendering lag and stutter, we can combine the efforts of multiple Apex Legends players by combining our dxvk-cache files using the dxvk-cache-tool created by DarkTigrus. Lutris provides a build of this tool here.
This effort was originally started by u/ryao in this r/linux_gaming thread. This thread worked well for a while but will eventually get lost in the history of the subreddit and may not be easy to find, especially for new players. Additionally, the history of the cache file is not readily available and cannot be quickly reverted in the event of a bad merge. This repository will also add more transparency to each merge, make it easier to give credit to each contributer, and can be more easily forked/transfered should I or any future mantainers decide to stop working on this project.
View the r5apex.dxvk-cache file in this repository and click the Download button in the top right hand corner. You can also use this link to directly download the file to your computer. Copy the downloaded file to your Apex Legends shadercache folder located at /path/to/steamapps/shadercache/1172470/DXVK_state_cache/r5apex.dxvk-cache. By default this location is ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/shadercache/1172470/DXVK_state_cache/r5apex.dxvk-cache. That's it!
You could also clone this repository to your local machine and either manually or automatically pull each update and copy your local repository files to the same location listed above. This does require installing and seting git and git-lfs for which there are many guides available online.
Fork this repository and clone it to your local machine. You will need git-lfs set up to track the cache file. Use the dxvk-cache-tool available here to combine the current r5apex.dxvk-cache file in the repository with your local r5apex.dxvk-cache file. Create a new commit with a commit message containing the current unix timestamp. An example workflow might look something like this.
Copy your local cache file to the location of the repository cache file.
cp ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/shadercache/1172470/DXVK_state_cache/r5apex.dxvk-cache ./r5apex-local.dxvk-cache
Merge your repository cache file with your local cache file. Make a note of the number of entries added by your file!
dxvk-cache-tool ./r5apex.dxvk-cache ./r5apex-local.dxvk-cache
Rename the output cache file.
mv ./output.dxvk-cache ./r5apex.dxvk-cache
Add the new file, commit, and push to your repository.
git add r5apex.dxvk-cache
git commit -m "$(date +%s)"
git push origin main
Create a pull request on this repository and make sure to include the number of new entries this request will add to the cache file!
u/ryao (original maintainer on r/linux_gaming)
u/Melon__Bread
u/najodleglejszy
u/PsychologicalLog1090
u/a9dnsn
u/LilCalosis
u/Flubberding
u/AnyEntertainment8080
u/arvind-d
u/DAVE_nn
u/yourfavrodney
u/jumper775
u/Tiflotin
u/NineBallAYAYA
u/najodleglejszy
u/CaptainKrisss
u/Nik0ne
u/Tenshar
u/-ThunderFox
u/EpicCreeper713
u/Kitchen-Drop236
u/SneakySnk
u/K1f0
u/gudhost
u/wanna_play_r5
u/baryluk
u/sP6awFXL94V6vH7C
This would not be possible without everyone who originally contributed to this file when Apex Legends first supported Linux and could not continue to be possible wihout each contribution and user from the community.
Together, we will slátra our enemies.