Epic fail!
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The funniest thing here is that a company that has been making software for more 30 years had to rely on automated tool to make a piece of software their programmers couldn't make.
As much as I like steam, this perfectly demonstrate how great competition is to improve stuff.
Now if only they would stop shooting themselves...
So, for steam this was actually available from the 9th of september in a Beta version of the client. And wasnt exactly pushed out as an update to spite epic, it is just part of a much bigger and more interesting update.
Can read the patch notes here - https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/710037059469839721
With how fast steam deployed this change, it had to have already been in the works for a while (dev time, testing, etc.). The only reason the Steam startup performance improvements are even news is that Epic decided to throw away more of what little credibility they have left to try to make Valve look bad, and failed enormously. Vibe coding isn't competition; it's lazy and a mistake.
Steam is barely competing, the update come before the Epic boast. Valve is really just doing their own thing.
If they did a day early, it's probably not to beat the competition though
This reminds me of when Samsung kept taking potshots at Apple in their marketing and Apple just ignored it while the iPhone continued to be massively popular. It's like a one-sided "please acknowledge me!" rivalry.
(I still hate Apple btw)
Not excusing Epic here, but TBH Steam was pretty bloated. It still is. Valve got too complacent with it.
Iβd really rather not have to run a ton of CPU/GPU/RAM-sapping churn in the background just to run a game. And if I do, at least make it leaner when minimized, not a full browser + a ton of other stuff.
It's not just bloated, it has a bunch of semi abandoned features and relatively simple bugs that they just don't care about fixing. Which is super weird. And I LIKE maximalism and features.
And as absolutely true as this post is, I also feel like this was a little corporate BM from valve. Which is concerning, given their position in the market; I don't want valve to turn into a machine that punches down. That's super toxic culture.
Sounds like you need more RAM dog
I have 128GB. For my setup specifically, I'm more worried about background CPU/GPU usage causing hitches.
But we are in a RAM apocalypse, so people running games with barely enough RAM/VRAM will be fairly common these days.
If you're ok to reduce the steam client to only a list of your games and sacrifice some features:
https://www.howtogeek.com/694531/how-to-reduce-steams-ram-usage-from-400-mb-to-60-mb/
Nice, my current machine canβt even handle that much, lol
My system works for what I need it for, but I canβt wait to upgrade hardcore once all of the bubble implodes and all of the tech fabs need consumers again.
So i actually tried and timed my steam startup in CachyOS, it's about 5.9sec. Wanna know how Epic Launcher stack up? 2.9sec. Am kinda surprised at how fast it start up, but then i play around a bit and realise it's still as barebone as the old launcher, of course it's able to launch that fast. The real challenge they now have to face is to add features into the launcher and have it still launch as fast.
As for whether the game able to launch or not, i've yet to try, but i assume they'll just use Proton as their compatibility layer.
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