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.”
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?
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.
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.
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?
Power bill too high. It’s easy to turn it off when 8 go to bed.
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
Gotta restart when updating, I want that new kernel and services!
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.
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.
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.
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.
if you notice a 5ms delay in steam bootup times it might mean there’s a virus
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
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.
Epic: I Feel Bad For You
Valve: I Don’t Think About You At All
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.
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
And to add to that this was already part of the Beta update from 9. September
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.”
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.
It’s vibe coded, and what they actually need to do is build up their features
It was only very recently you could even look at your own games library. The ecosystem couldn’t/wouldn’t tell you if you owned a game or not.
They have zero social integration features and it’s 2026.
Anybody who defends them is delusional, EPIC are absolute garbage, they are not competing with Valve despite what people keep saying. There is no competition.
It was only very recently you could even look at your own games library.
Really? I am definitely unfamiliar with their launcher, but I could have sworn you could view your library.
Their vibe code lead to an improvement to what we actually use, so it’s a win.
I don’t see how the application opening somewhat faster is much of an improvement; they need to go after feature parity if they want to actually compete with Steam.
Their vibe code lead to an improvement to what we actually use, so it’s a win.
They could have done this without vibe coding too. Or is nobody in Epic Games able to program anymore? Even the communities doing a better job and they are not even paid to do this.
I also like the concept of Epic, but not actually Epic.
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.
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.
In terms of graphical features, sure, probably. In my (admittedly limited) experience Source games tend to have much better performance and modding, which I find much more important.
Yeah, while the graphics capabilities of Unreal are about a decade ahead with dynamic occlusion culling, hyperrealistic lighting, a very very large set of libraries of 4k and 8k textures, and volumetrics…
the downside is that Unreal Engine is difficult to optimize and harder to use with low level programming.
I expect things to get much worse as they continue to slop-ify. They already advertised an “AI-assisted” build when they published the comparison.
IDK about anyone else, but I’m kind of over hyperrealism in games at this point. Facial animations are still uncanny after multiple decades of trying to figure it out, but less realistic styles have looked great that whole time. Hell, I’ve seen pixel graphics with more expressiveness and emotion than some Unreal engine games. Sure the lighting and set pieces are pretty, but stuff like that doesn’t do it for me nearly as much as good animations, good gameplay, and good story.
Yeah but the performance is mostly due to its age. It’s much more limited in what you can do. BSPs are great for efficiency, but they’re a huge pain to work with when creating a map. Unreal is leagues better to work with in just about every way.
That’s up to developers that use it. Though I haven’t much experience with Valve’s profiling tools it being closed source makes it harder for devs that want to rewrite any given feature
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
every unreal game i’ve played since UE3 has run worse than it’s contemporaries :c
Until Unreal is completely sloppified
Then it’ll live up to the name!
He was recently quoted in an article saying that in order to be successful, games need to launch on the Steam platform.
“Reduced artificial delays by half”
- sleep(100)
+ sleep(50)
We have some of this, but it’s usually to ensure that some system or hardware is available.
We’re a kiosk app on android so get started automatically on boot, and sometimes storage isn’t available so we have to delay before loading our config or we get errors.
I know this might be unnecessary over engineering but there has to be a way to check when storage is available and wait for that instead of simply waiting for a fixed amount of time and hope that storage is available then.
There are calls we could make to query storage availability, but we can’t move forward at this particular point without loading the settings, so we need to wait.
We run on a limited number of devices, and know which manufacturers / devices have slow startups, so it’s a little less resource intensive to just wait a few ms on those devices than to continually query storage, or handle the missing storage exceptions in a loop (invoking error handlers is generally pretty expensive, and we don’t want to log this particular issue).
This is usually at a device reboot in the middle of the night when no one is working, so even a few seconds at startup isn’t the end of the world.
Why would you do that instead of polling with retry/backoff?
You may think this is a joke, but people will start complaining if a program is too fast.
I’m sure it happens, but in 25 years I’ve never had a client complain about anything being 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?
What does starting a program “too” fast mean? And who complained ever about it? Any links?
Psychology. People think that if a process completes remarkably quickly, it didn’t do the whole thing. Plenty of articles on the psychology of progress bars; take your pick.
One interesting scenario is that games used to have tips on their loading screens. With SSDs, everything loads so fast that if you might miss it if it closes automatically.
Regarding the loading screen scenario: I get that you would put tips in your loading screen so the player doesn’t get bored when he has to wait. But I would never artificially extend the loading duration to show tips.
How will my splines get reticulated?
As pathetic as Epic is, this is a strong demonstration of why monopolies are bad and competition is needed.
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.
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.
Boasting about some improvement being vibe coded is such a confusing disconnect for me. There are so many layers of transparent shit that I cannot see through it.
People dislike epic game launcher for so many reasons. The launch time is something I’ve never considered important.
The “look how much better we are than X” makes you seem like douchebag. They, don’t seem to grasp it, or they will wouldn’t boast, and that makes it even worse. Then they admit that it was vibe coded. Why? I become immediately suspicious of the change being done carelessly, isn’t properly QA tested, and indicative of a shitty state to begin with. I wasn’t going to install the epic launcher on Linux, but now I’m even less likely to do so.
It might launch in negative time for all I care, but when I scroll down and it takes 30 seconds to load a fucking 128px PNG of the box art… Yeah sorry still useless.
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?
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.
For me it regularly takes (took? haven’t used Steam after the update) 15+ seconds
Because most people don’t care.
Huh, I guess competition is good for motivating improvement. Even when you’re competing against the kid that eats paste.
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.
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.
The Steam client uses CEF not Electron (which also uses CEF), not that the distinction is very important
Your link isn’t working for me
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
