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.”
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/710037059469839721
The actual update post from Valve. Why is it not linked in the article? The notes are huge, with many things improved. Off course one of the improvements would probably lead to better loading times. This isn’t a response to Epic Games, this is a main update developed way before.
Honestly, that makes it even better to me. Here’s Epic bragging about beating Steam in some way meanwhile Valve’s like “here’s a little something we’ve been working on for a while. No biggy.”
Steam stays winning
And to add to that this was already part of the Beta update from 9. September
Avoid stealing focus when the Steam main window opens, if another window was activated during startup/login.
Holy hell finally. This has annoyed me for so damn long.
This annoys me too, not only with Steam. But I thought this is an issue on my operating system. I wasn’t aware this could be solved by the client side.
please understand, they’re a starving indie company
Huh, I guess competition is good for improvement. Even when you’re competing against the kid that eats paste.
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 glGames 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
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
Because most people don’t care.
Has it? I never noticed. It always been fast for me. 2 seconds is too long?
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.
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.
How will my splines get reticulated?
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!
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.
I open steam exactly once, then never again until I restart my computer. Why would this even matter.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
You guys are restarting your computers?
Power bill too high. It’s easy to turn it off when 8 go to bed.
Because not everyone is you?
Also devices like steam deck and steam machine.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/
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
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
if you notice a 5ms delay in steam bootup times it might mean there’s a virus
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.
You know, my while is 3.4x faster to start up and get going than my car but I am not driving to Tampa on my ebike. Actually wouldn’t drive there in the car either. tampa smells like an infected armpit on your grampa Earl.
How high were you when you wrote this
Oh holy crap I shouldn’t be commenting on my phone, that’s a horrific mess. And the answer is not high or drunk at all, just bad at typing while on a conference call.
As pathetic as Epic is, this is a strong demonstration of why monopolies are bad and competition is needed.
I’m with you on this. I’ve been rather annoyed with watching steam constantly needing to re-download 500 MB of whatever the hell randomly and I run a lot of computers that restart often (benchmarking shitty PCS is kind of a hobby for me).
I’m glad someone called them out and I’m glad that they responded by improving their software and in record time packing it into the next regular release.
This whole thing looks like the market acting like it should when there is at least a tiny modicum of competition. Just wish the competition was healthier and more vibrant. And less Epic.
The Steam update has been available in the beta client for over a month. This wasn’t a response, they had already done it.
shrug I still love Steam, and I still love that anyone is trying to keep 'em honest.
I generally run mainline client, so I’m glad they decided to release the update to us non-Beta users.
Its not a random update in response to Epic.
The September 9 beta branch mentioned improved start up time.
Steam quietly improves itself without making big announcements calling out other companies to try to get attention. Its why it has been working on stuff like Proton, steamos, and hardware.
This isn’t a case of competition though; Valve didn’t slip in a last second speedup to get back at Epic, the patch had already been built and tested and just happened to come out a day after Epic’s did.
Completely irrelevant ofc that the Steam Client is much more than a glorified game shortcut collection with a shop.
Indeed. Steam client is an Electron app that can display advertisements, too.
Your link isn’t working for me
The Steam client uses CEF not Electron (which also uses CEF), not that the distinction is very important
I’ve had it where my Linux machine boos too fast and I see a red mark fly by in the sea of green check marks. So then I have to go check boot log because display was too fast to read on startup
Idk if this is slop, but it’s funny
EGS loads faster because there’s fewer features to load.
Why does Epic always seem so desperate?
Because people and companies react
Because Tim Sweeny - despite swimming in Fortnite and Unreal Engine money - is extremely insecure and has been envious of Gabe Newell and his platform’s success for decades.
Because they’re desperate
Not desperate, but jealous.
Oh no, I have to wait a whole 5 extra seconds
They are each bloatware that insists upon itself.
If Steam had not acquired a userbase by vendor lock-in it would be no more popular than any other “game launcher”.
People that insist that steam is good in any way are either never seen any other program or lying to themselves, it’s a horrible mess with a million pages that forces you to use itself because who knows why.
Honestly, my biggest issue with gaming on linux is that every damn launcher copies steam’s format - I want a (non vibe-coded) launcher that just makes a desktop file with a proper icon, and has a launch command.
I dont want the launcher to insert itself into the command, I want it to build the command I would use myself if I decided to delete the launcher.
Not sure why that’s so hard, its not like the launcher is actually needed for a game to launch.
That I believe is the game using steam’s drm. But if you have the right tools you can force games to do exactly what you said.
