Locating the "Compiling Shaders" Folder

Hi everyone,

Apologies if asking for support in this part of the forum is not the right place to do so, however I have gone through the FAQs and various online sources and have not found the solution so asking here instead.

My question is simple. I have a 512GB NVMe system drive that I also use for basic programs and where I keep my RPCS3 folder. My game files are on another NVMe drive but it contains only the images of the games.

What I have noticed is that when the emulator starts compiling shaders, it uses AppData\Local\Temp\rpcs3_vm_sparse.tmp file which is about 34GB. This is drive C: by default.

I am wondering if there is a way to send these "shader compilation" files to the drive that contains the game iso's or any other drive that is not the system one. The reason is this drive has already quite a lot of data written into it and any more GB written onto it decreases its lifespan even further. For example, it is 32GB this time, but as I play futher and the next time I start the emulator, it will be possibly another 10GB, and then another 5GB or something. I am trying to find the location of the folders or the settings that allow me to move these temporary files to another drive. There have been some comments about Virtual File System on Reddit but I am unsure how to proceed exactly and the dev_hdd0\data drive is incomparable to the one in the Temp folder. The rest too.

I just want to reduce the further wear-and-tear of my OS and basic programs drive and would really appreciate basic guidance on how to make sure these temporary "shaders compilation" and other files required for the games to launch and work now and in the future get always written to another drive of preference and not to the system one.

Many thanks in advance and I can provide more details, if needed.

rpcs3_vm file is 0 bytes on disk and it's completely unrelated to shader compilation.
Shader caches are a couple of MBs per game.
No need to do anything regarding these two things, as you won't gain any noticeable space there.

I just want to say thank you for the valuable feedback and the great work on the emulator. You are right, it is 0 bytes on disk (I should have read it all when I have seen 34GB reported in Properties). I should have also been more precise about the shader caches too, I meant (in the case of deletion of the file and starting over, the system creates it again and I was thinking it will grow over time).

Thank you for the prompt reply and your amazing work once again!