No, it’s used much more often. How often is determined by a value called swapiness.

Yeah, I gad a lot of problems with it on NixOS.l, to the point of kde becoming unresponsive during shader processing. I had a much better experience once I installed cfs zen tweaks which iptimizes the ketnel a bit for desktop usage.

Yeah, but I don’t know if it should be turned on by default. Shader processing takes a lot of CPU resources, even on a high-end one I notice some small stutters in general desktop usage while it processes. Lower grade CPUs could be pretty unusable, I think.

Have you checked “Process vulkan shaders in the background” under settings -> download? That way it does that in the background when you’re not playing