Bottom Line: You can safely delete the Steam shadercache folder to free up space, but you will experience temporary stuttering the next time you launch your games.
What is the Steam shadercache?
Located in your Steam installation directory (usually C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\shadercache), this folder stores pre-compiled shaders for your games.
Shaders are tiny programs that tell your graphics card how to render lighting, shadows, and textures. Instead of forcing your computer to compile these shaders on-the-fly while you are playing (which causes lag spikes and stuttering), Steam downloads pre-compiled versions of them or compiles them before the game starts. Over time, especially if you have a lot of games installed, this folder can grow to tens of gigabytes.
Can you delete it?
✅ Yes, it is perfectly safe to delete.
Deleting this folder will not delete your games, your save files, or your settings. It only removes the cached graphics data.
How to delete it
- Close Steam completely (right-click the Steam icon in your system tray and select Exit).
- Navigate to your Steam installation folder. The default location is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\ - Locate the folder named
shadercache. - Right-click the folder and select Delete (or press Shift + Delete to bypass the Recycle Bin).
- Restart Steam.
What happens after you delete it?
You will immediately get all of that disk space back.
However, the next time you launch a game, one of two things will happen:
- Steam will notice the shaders are missing and automatically download them again before the game launches.
- The game will have to compile the shaders as you play. This will result in noticeable frame-rate drops and “stuttering” for the first few minutes of gameplay as you encounter new visual effects.
Eventually, the shadercache folder will fill back up again as you continue to play your games.
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