this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Epic Games Bragged About Beating Steam’s Boot Times So Valve Dropped A Patch (www.eteknix.com)
submitted 1 week ago by slartibartfast141@piefed.zip to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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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.”

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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] chloroken@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

5s to open an application on an SSD is slow

That isnt how this works. Starting an application is not the same as loading a game stage that pulls lots of data from disk. There could be CPU, network, or even GPU tasks at hand that have nothing to do with drive speed.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago

I know steam does a lot of things, but how many have to block the app opening, and how much is their embedded chromium dragging this down?

For example authenticating your account seems mandatory, but can you load frameworks while that’s happening. You can load and validate user library asynchronously. You don’t have to have the store page downloaded to show the main page.

I get optimizing for load is not really a goal, but optimizing for the whole should be.