Often when I launch a game through Steam that “processing Vulkan shaders” window appears and loads for a couple minutes. Sometimes it takes no time, sometimes it takes several minutes. But then, for larger games like Dune Awakening or Outer Worlds 2, the game needs to sit and process shaders for another couple minutes anyway. But for some games, like Enshrouded, I can skip the Vulkan processing with no problems in the game (I do that because the Vulkan processing doesn’t go anywhere). So what is that Vulkan processing for?
Actually, a lot of modern games on Windows suffer from micro stutters and frame hitching because it’s often compiling on demand if shader compilation isn’t built in upfront in the game. A lot of games run smoother on Linux with proton because of the shader precompilation.
Also, a lot of games hide it in load screens and don’t explicitly tell you. If you’ve ever updated a game and first run seems to be slower to load, that’s the game compiling shaders for you.