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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
if you notice a 5ms delay in steam bootup times it might mean there’s a virus
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.
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
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
Epic: I Feel Bad For You
Valve: I Don’t Think About You At All
Idk if this is slop, but it’s funny
As much as I dislike Epic, it’s good that they’re at least trying to compete with Valve. Forces them to actually get out patches like that.
Tim Sweeny: “Is there anything we are better at than steam? Literally anything? I will take anything we can market, no matter how pathetic and desperate it seems.”
Going forward we optimize for “restore from system tray” time. That’ll be a game changer.
I can’t wait! I’m really going to notice a 0.1s faster restore time.
That’s just a “uses more memory whilst minimised.”
Unreal is better than Source.
The licensing for source is better than unreal. Its only stipend it has to be published on steam. (Which you’re most likely to do anyway) while unreal requires 5% royalities over 1mil gross revenue (outside of epic store, which lets be real… wont account for much)
FWIW Steam takes a 30% cut from sales
And for that cut they provide hosting, cloud saves, promotion, distribution, community support, workshop availability, DLC handling, and a store page. The cut is also much less than what larger publishing companies charge for less service. Self publishing is very feasible on Steam.
As does every store, digital and physical, except EGS and Microsoft. That’s the standard retail cut.
every unreal game i’ve played since UE3 has run worse than it’s contemporaries :c
Until Unreal is completely sloppified
“Reduced artificial delays by half”
- sleep(100)
+ sleep(50)
You may think this is a joke, but people will start complaining if a program is too fast.
Because they feel like (from their perspective) complex operations should require “effort” by the system and program so that they appear heavy and meaningful?
Who the fuck cares if the fast launcher is a piece of crap with a fraction of features needed for a good library and storefront?
Completely irrelevant ofc that the Steam Client is much more than a glorified game shortcut collection with a shop.
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
As spotted by reports from RespawnFirst and testing shared on X by user @girlglock_, the updated Steam client now completes a cold boot in just 5.23 seconds on comparable test hardware. That shaves nearly five seconds off the previous figure Epic used in its comparison charts, and edges past the 5.47-second benchmark set by Epic’s new AI-assisted preview build.
They both still start too slowly, 5s to open an application on SSD is slow.
Steam has been working on start up time for a while now, in September they started updating it for the Seam Machine and Big Picture mode, but the whole thing got faster. I’m pretty sure this has been in the beta client for a month, so it seems stupid that Epic would go with such a strong marketing push about how slow steam is on something steam is actively improving.
My best guess is they thought they could put this out while technically true and look good, and nobody would notice when Steam shipped this? Just weird marketing.
Recently, Epic Games decided to tackle that reputation head-on by unveiling a preview version of its rebuilt Epic Games Launcher V2, which the company proudly noted was developed with heavy AI assistance. Basically, a decade of working on it themselves, no luck, but they got the AI vibes to help and it did a better job… Not the brag they seem to think it is, but let’s roll with it for now.
Damn, do you need something for that burn?
Why does Epic always seem so desperate?
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.
Both of them are using a form of embedded Chromium to display the store, no? Is this really worth competing about then? xD
The Starcraft launcher goes under 1 second on a pentium 1, there.
I had to work with embedded chromium once. It’s how I became a watcher on bug #126, which took 9 years to resolve. 9 years for “what happens when I click a link in embedded chromium” 🍿🤓
Wait “which took 9 years to resolve.” isn’t the linked ticket resolved as “won’t fix”‽
Did they change enough that it no longer happens thereby fixing it indirectly? Or do they no longer care that it might confuse users?
Why wouldn’t you just set the link to launch the user’s browser, instead of expecting Chromium to implement special case behavior?
That is the bug:
What is the expected result?
Open the link target in default browser, leaving SSB window on original site, thereby preserving desktop application illusion.
What happens instead?
Link opens in current window.
Epic needs to boot faster because it gets closed. Drain on data having that shit open and it fucks with my already shit internet.
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.
