Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”
Idk if this is slop, but it’s funny
My “Hello, World!” script boots approximately 18000x faster than the Epic launcher.
The difference in features between the two is about the same as it is between Steam and the Epic launcher.
Technically correct, practically wrong, they are both gaming store bloat apps but steam is a steaming (!) pile of a webshite that takes longer to load than some games (for me at least) and uses 700mb of ram/vram.
Technically correct, practically wrong
This is exactly the point made with the ridiculous Hello World-example. It’s a parody of the original post. Epic is technically correct, but practically wrong.
Even if Steam was slower, it’s a better platform. When I go to a game’s store page on Steam I learn literally everything about it. Literally everything I need to know. Because there’s user reviews. Because there’s a link to the forums.
EGS doesn’t have user input. They don’t even include as many vids/screenshots. It’s all very low effort and I have to go elsewhere to figure things out about the product.
Launch times don’t matter to me. I never shut Steam down, and I almost never open EGS. What an odd metric to boast about, anyway. Launch time is the least of EGS’ problems.
As Steam has been extremely slow to launch for quite some time now, anybody want to take a stab at why it took an Epic Games taunt for them to take care of it?
From what others said, this has been in the beta. Epic tried to beat this release just to be able to technically say they were faster for a day.
Ah. So there you go. And it will go down in history written in stone and people will still be talking about it 100 years from now
Has it? I never noticed. It always been fast for me. 2 seconds is too long?
Could be you have it set to start up when you boot your computer, as it’s pretty quick to “launch” when it’s actually already running but hidden in the system tray. I have it set to be manually launched on mine and yeah 10 seconds sounds about right for what I’m used to (haven’t restarted since the update).
No I don’t like it running in the background and It isn’t set to start on boot. It bugs me when steam is running and I am not using it.
Linux user, so no I don’t hide it in a system tray.
I think there is a clue here though: Linux does drive cache a lot. Possible that is why.
Maybe it’s because I’m opted into the beta, so I’m always downloading updates. But it always takes a couple of minutes to launch from scratch for me and my gaming PC is no slouch.
But once I launch it, I leave it up, I never close it, so it’s never just running in the background waiting for me to pop it up again.
For me it regularly takes (took? haven’t used Steam after the update) 15+ seconds
Because most people don’t care.
You think they only waited for epic to drop an update as if they monitor them from the inside?
That’s a next level conspiracy theory lol
The market leader being lazy is not a conspiracy theory. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that a competitor showing it can be done better motivated Steam to improve their product. That dynamic is a main reason why competition is good for the customer.
Who gives a shit even with a 5s difference
At least on arch and on my hardware it is the difference of ~2s and ~8s, launching 4x as fast is substantial.
Still not using it over heroic tho.
I’d get it if it were minutes but i’m just gonna say 8s is hardly long enough to even think about the fact that it’s taking 8s.
EGS loads faster because there’s fewer features to load.
Steam is great at being fetter free and no bells and whistles service. They just do what the customers want rather than being pro-greedy milkers who push customers to accept what they don’t want.
In what world is anything over a second acceptable. All launchers are otherly horrible.
In what world does that matter? Do you start Steam 50 times a day? Website, sure, you open thousands a day, but Steam? You open it once maximum twice a day.
Steam sucking in 3-2-1…
If it was so easy why has it taken so long?
Because it almost certainly wasn’t so easy and was something they’ve been working on for a while and just lined up this way
I think the post is misleading. Steam’s fixes to launch faster came out on October 13th, the day before Epic’s new client designed to launch faster came out. It is likely that someone at Valve spent a long time designing, coding, and testing the improvements.
As far as I’m aware, no one at Valve was bragging about their change being easy, or completing it quickly. Epic was/is the only one bragging.
Vibe coding is the most overused tech term I’ve ever seen in my life. Stfuuuuuuuuu.
In my opinion, respectfully disagreed. So many professional engineers i work with or hire now forget how to code. We now allow LLMs but you must read every single line and be able to audit and explain your stack as if you read every line. And we don’t allow them for anything larger than simple functions. They are attrociously inefficient. Yet so many execs and devs think they are super intelligent. Hence why we need to call out vibe coding.
Yet so many execs and devs think they are super intelligent.
Most people are dumb. They wont research anything, particularly when it agrees with what they already think (AI hype headlines). As long as the news keeps saying LLMs are the future of code and hacking, and, and, and, most people will just agree.
agreed, vibe used to be a positive word
Patch notes: “we didn’t think anyone really gave a shit, but fuck epic”
It didn’t really bother me before, but it has been kind of slow to start for a long time. Bad enough for me to notice that’s it’s slow, but not bad enough to feel the need to complain about it.
Now it only takes about 6 seconds for me which is perfectly fine. As someone who only runs Steam when I’m about to play a game through it, it’s a very noticeable improvement!
I let it run constantly and never really noticed the load time. Good to hear it is so quick now!
6 seconds isn’t really “so quick”, but I also never had a problem with it.
I open steam exactly once, then never again until I restart my computer. Why would this even matter.
I don’t get this mentality. Every little performance optimization matters. It might save 1s or even less for you, but coupled with hundreds of thousands of users, it saves a some amount of CPU time.
This is why competition is good. Being blindly loyal to a brand and defending their shit only benefits the companies.
I was thinking more along the lines of using it as a marketing gimmick on Epics side. If the difference is massive then sure, but why would a user care if the difference is small. There comes a point when you won’t notice how long it takes to open because it is fast enough for you to immediately just start thinking of why you opened the program in the first place.
Competition is very good, but competing with meaningless metrics is not really competing is it. The vibecoded slop shop isn’t exactly a paragon of monopoly busting consumer loving underdogs.
Some people get stuck on performance numbers that don’t matter. Like Linux users that say they want 5second boot time instead of 8. Why? Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h…when we have 120km/h road limits.
I don’t care for a 5 second boot time instead of 8, but I understand the desire to work towards a sub 1 second type of boot, even if it’s still farcical. We are surrounded by other tech like laptops, phones and TVs which go from standby to on in an instant, and as a PC user, where one puts personal stake in their PC being on par or better, chasing minimal times here matters.
I’m sure many people know the feeling of their Linux PC or pride of place mechanical keyboard modded ThinkPad suddenly looking crap to a casual tech user with a different understanding of what quality means. While the MacBook user may never gain the features of your device, you may theoretically beat them at their preferences, because you can technically do anything.
I’m eyeing up an oled monitor upgrade in the next few years. When I get it, I’m gonna use an old raspberry pi to basically make a simple, lightweight dupe of my PC desktop, then use a HDMI switch to have the oled screen have an instant useful boot while the apC actually boots in the background. My desk doesn’t face a part of my apartment otherwise used, so I may get a motion sensor too, so being at my desk turns on the pi’s “always on” display, which has the dual purpose of obscuring the PC boot. I don’t need this in any way, but it’ll feel 𝓈𝓁𝑒𝑒𝓀, and I want that.
tvs with webOS or macs people turn on usually are sleeping, so that 1 second startup is not really a boot. My nixos laptop turns “on” in about 1 second if it is sleeping…but I get what you are saying, it would be amazing yo have that fast of a cold boot
We all know that part, but that’s the comparison many very casual users would use. I would look uncool describing the difference to someone who told me my OC takes a long time to boot, and to a community of nerds, looking uncool to someone may be terrible. I’m sure this doesn’t impact everyone, but I understand the super short boot dream.
I had to wait an hour to boot on Windows 10 LTSC. Not the first machine I owned with that problem, either.
File system check?
Ran it regularly before and after the scheduled update every three months. Also ran a scheduled CHKDSK and DISM. Basically took a full day for routine updates. Cleared temporary files and unused AppData. Defragmented. I also frequently flushed DNS cache.
The fact that it’s not an issue with any individual hardware should have tipped you off that it’s not an “error” but just the way Windows is. You can find unresolved forums posts about this kind of issue going back to the early days of Windows 7 if you search.
If anybody is stupid enough to still use windows this is my advice: Enable the Hibernate option. It saves the RAM to disk and then resumes from there on startup, skipping any issues.
I actually suspect it started on the LTSC copy specifically after the Windows Store was installed, which cannot be undone.
I run Linux for everything at home…after W10 came out. But work issue machines are Windows. They have never had boot issues…they have a shit ton of other quirks though.
Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h…when we have 120km/h road limits.
Yeah, but to be fair that V10 Lamborghini Huracán can get up to that speed limit much more quickly than my budget-sports-car Scion tC can. Besides, how are we supposed to know how small their penis is unless they rev their engine up so loud it hurts everyone’s ears?
Boot times are such a arbitrary performance statistic. My Nobara machine boots quite fast, but i had to put a 30s timeout for my array of hard drives in the fstab to make sure they get mounted correctly. That’s not the fault of the OS, it’s a hardware limitation that can’t really be worked around at all.
I spend like 30 seconds prior to booting to “train my RAM” or whatever. DDR5 feels like a massive step backwards to the 90s.
That sounds like it might be a hardware-specific problem, I occasionally have to wait before my PC starts booting properly, which is presumably RAM training or something, but that’s more of a “once in a couple months” thing, otherwise it just boots straight up?
Maybe, maybe not. I’ve spent a few hours plodding around, tweaked the settings in BIOS, upgraded the BIOS, tried different versions. Eventually I just left it because it’s not worth the time. It has definitely soured my view on DDR5 though. DDR4 didn’t need to be trained and worked just fine. What a nonsense feature.
I think you might be able to skip that if you want to - if you know at what timings your RAM works fine at (probably the values your PC uses while working, there are tools for looking that up), you can probably just set it in your BIOS and be done with it.
Are you sure? I experienced the same thing when going from DDR3 to 5 with the absurd boot time when it has to do “training”. I found no fix other than a setting where the BIOS does not do it every boot, but only every once in a whole. Well at least I have error correction built in finally.
Normally, the training is only relevant when new DDR5 is installed - that should really not occur every boot, but it might depending on BIOS settings. There should be a setting called “Memory Context Restore” or similar in the DRAM timing configuration section to stop this from happening (outside of your mainboard erroneously detecting your RAM as newly installed or the detected timings fail, which can either be a hardware issue, firmware bug or an incompability with the installed modules - or simply badly seated RAM or even stuff like EM interference or a noticable difference in room temperature - these things are easily disturbed)
Edit: A bit more detailed: There are basically 2 different tests that are done: a “quick” calibration (used by “Memory Context Restore”) and a “thorugh” test where it tries to get stable timings (the latter one being the “training”). When the quick calibration settings fail on POST (specifically, during training it looks at internal timing and voltage offsets/skews - these you can’t read out with normal software and are only partially reflected in whatever you get when you look at the current RAM configuration, e.g. a borderline tPHYRDL; MCR just applies the last settings and checks if they work), it falls back to the training phase. A fallback means that what maximum stable timings you get out of your Ram are not the same every time - the training sets timings, and once in a blue moon quick calibration with these settings fails, leading to a full recalibration. If you want to ensure that you don’t have to deal with this, you should be able to manually set your timings to limit the space the training can happen in, speeding up all of this up very much - training has less “area” to check and will also land in a space where you know your RAM is stable (pls only do if you know what you are doing!)
Public relations, pride, vengeance?
Companies often take actions which don’t directly improve the product for customers but instead offer benefits to the company. Typing that out in 2026 is… It’s nice that it isn’t pure enshittification for once.
I actually kinda hate that steam is always running.
I get the reasons why, but I would rather just have like a steam updater daemon than the full app running, and would also prefer that Steam starts quickly unless you catch it during the daemon’s start up.
The other use case is for HTPC I do not like Big Picture mode as my “home” experience. If you open Steam with game scope it goes into big picture automatically, so it’s designed for Steam Machine experiences and not HTPC. The new screensaver feature (which is in beta, so should improve) uses a lot of GPU and polls CPU frequently, so it’s actually a bit annoying to have running. I would rather use a more native launcher than the Big Picture mode experience, so you end up having to watch the opening animation frequently to mask the slow startup.
Again, this is pretty mild, and I don’t think even PS5 provides a large improvement.
Have you tried small mode? It’s a built-in option.
https://www.howtogeek.com/694531/how-to-reduce-steams-ram-usage-from-400-mb-to-60-mb/
https://www.xbitlabs.com/blog/mini-steam/
(The instructions are Windows-centric, but the process is pretty much the same on Linux I think. You can figure it out)
TIL, no I haven’t tried it, and I’ll have to see how it works out
If I can run that as a background thing and open games directly it would be a nice experience
I haven’t really messed with it, only tried it once to see if the command worked and it did
I’m pretty sure this no longer works. The minigameslist is no longer available and almost all components are implemented using CEF
Edit: wait wait wait is small mode back??
Edit 2: apparently it was never gone and I’m just stupid lol
When I did my quick Google search, I did see a few reddit posts along the lines of “where did small mode go?!” So maybe they did briefly get rid of it before bringing it back because of backlash.
You guys are restarting your computers?
Gotta restart when updating, I want that new kernel and services!
every time I finish using it I switch it off, I might not use my PC the next day, or if so it will be late in the day, I can often go 2 or 3 days and don’t start it, attending to a few things I need via my phone.
Sleeping doesnt work on my device
I ran into a Mesa bug a while back where after sleeping my computer, I would come back to find all the fans spinning full speed, everything is hot, and it’s completely locked up. After that happened a couple times I stopped sleeping my computer and started turning it off at night.
Power bill too high. It’s easy to turn it off when 8 go to bed.
My windows work laptop (company provided it and won’t let me install linux for “safety reasons”; same reasons why they ask me to use chrome instead of firefox, btw): hey, so I know you’re right now working but I just downloaded an update and you know what? I’m restarting now.
For you it wouldn’t really matter much. It is a big improvement and very much noticeable, but it matters much more for people like me that only runs Steam when I’m about to play a game through it which can happen several times a day.
You never boot your computer until you reboot it either, yet if it took 10+ minutes to boot like a PC would many years ago, you’d complain.
More performance is almost always more better, unless you’re on embedded devices where binary sizes matter, but for us on desktops with comparatively abundant resources, why moan about a free improvement?
It depends if it’s a free improvement or not. If this improved time to open the window at the cost of deferring loading some important functionality it might be a net loss for example
Thankfully, the only company that I believe has ever made an attempt to make something load faster by making it functionally worse is Microsoft with Windows Fast-Startup.
“Ah yes, I know how to make their OS load faster… We’ll just never shut it down!” - That’s Microsoft-tier intelligence right there.
No, I do not believe that Valve would make their storefront worse in any sense just to beat Epic Games; they frankly couldn’t give less of a shit, because they know that the EGL is not competition.
Somebody thought they Kobayashi Maru’d performance optimization
Because not everyone is you?
Also devices like steam deck and steam machine.
I don’t know but Steam (or any other app) stealing focus was a really big pet peeve of mine. Glad it’s allegedly fixed.
Valid. I think a lot of people do this. I may be an outlier, I don’t like having launchers open unless I need them open, so I close them whenever I’m done gaming.
Letting arbitrarily executing code run persistently is a security/privacy risk, for those who care.
I trust steam more, but I hate that discord does this stuff.
Also its probably bug territory, but steam always fucking opens big picture if you press the home button any time its running with a controller, even in the background.
Like I get they probably focused on steam deck UX for their incredibly helpful push to linux, but the dev in me can’t help but be pissed off they implemented it so lazily.
The home button behavior is on purpose and has been there since the first steam controller. If steam is not open it opens steam, if it is then it opens big picture mode. I’ve only ever had it happen when not in a game so unless you are trying to open something like the Xbox game bar or using the button as your own shortcut I’m not sure when you would run into that problem. Sucks there isnt a setting to turn it off though I guess. Sorry bud.
Thats why I call it lazy not malicious, any other company and it’d be a focus stealing dark pattern.
I usually map the home button in emulators, or if I need an extra key.
Itd make sense for steamos to have that default, but the setting has been enforced by default for like a decade
You can turn off steam using a certain controller type (or all) but by default it takes them over. It can cause problems with some software, and apparently doesn’t leave controllers in the same state afterwards.
Works well for me though, the only time I use controllers is for steam games and it handles all the mapping/customization pretty well
if you notice a 5ms delay in steam bootup times it might mean there’s a virus
Epic: I Feel Bad For You
Valve: I Don’t Think About You At All
