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Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher

Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher

starkparker

Comments (225)

  • tancop
    I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
  • hombre_fatal
    > Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
  • Goronmon
    All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.No Community marketplace for in-game itemsNo Direct player-to-player item tradingNo Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shopI hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
  • kakuri
    Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
  • Ameo
    This is why software is slow and everything uses 2GB of RAM at idle: because nobody really cares.I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.
  • mawadev
    I have to say, Epics vibe is just malicious and toxic. Steam is silent and just lets things speak for themselves. What is the value of an idea if it does not work in the real world?I just wish the people at Epic collectively took some vacation and came back with a less breathing down neck attitude towards everything. Just chill out, relax, it is a browser for searching, buying and downloading games
  • goatking
    Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated
  • butz
    And that's why having some competition is useful for consumers. I would like to see this trend to continue and game launchers improving not only startup times, but RAM usage and disk size usage. I just looked into my `.steam` directory, and it is taking up over 10GB of disk size, and I have only single game installed, that is only about 500MB in size.Now patiently waiting for GOG answer to this competition.
  • alecsm
    Epic is so bad that I rather pay for a game on Steam than getting it for free on their store.
  • qalmakka
    > CEFAh that's the reason why they came up with an instant speedup. Optimising CEF is basically like docking a zero from your speedup loop [1][^1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
  • Scharkenberg
    So it's a D-measuring contest now? Also, I found the tone of the writing on that site, including the picture of Gabe Newell, kind of obnoxious.
  • tym0
    Absolutely bonkers to brag about your app taking 5 _entire_ seconds to start...
  • himata4113
    I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
  • forlorn
    I've been using Rare for a couple of years, never had a problem. It's much more lightweight and fast.https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare
  • nashashmi
    What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
  • jonathanlydall
    > Your country is not allowed to access this resourceWhat’s the issue they have with South Africa?
  • giorgioz
    I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
  • messer979
    Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
  • schmorptron
    If this is the start of epic competing on features and quality for both devs and players instead of just buying up exclusive rights then I'm all for it
  • rpunkfu
    App to launch apps is loading in little over 5s, on what I assume is high-end gaming pc.Truly something to be proud of..
  • londons_explore
    When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.It is fast though!
  • 2001zhaozhao
    The problem with advertising "vibe coding" is that anyone can do it.
  • Retr0id
    I don't know why anyone's assuming Valve isn't "vibe coding" too.
  • sitzkrieg
    on the flipside, it takes longer to start the steam client than it does to load and start the first level in half life
  • boxed
    Public shaming works.
  • swinglock
    Next let's review their RAM usage while idle, shall we?
  • freecodeio
    epic games can build a launcher that has hard coded bytes and runs on it's own localized cpu space and I would still use steam
  • fnctrev
    Does “ai assisted” count as an architecture?
  • anon
    undefined
  • nirav72
    Not sure why this is even a comparison. Steam Client has been optimized over years of development and updates.
  • anon
    undefined
  • drnick1
    It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
  • dlcarrier
    Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
  • mock-possum
    Epic will do anything to beat Valve, apart from actually being better than Valve
  • add-sub-mul-div
    Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
  • MokaAkashiya
    How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
  • amelius
    First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?
  • nicman23
    that is great and all but why was it slow previously
  • dgaaaaaaaaaa
    I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D
  • IshKebab
    They're posting this as some kind of gotcha against AI, as if Valve aren't using AI too.
  • swiftcoder
    It is incredibly funny that Steam could have fixed this at any time, but didn't prioritise doing so until Epic openly challenged them. This is why we can't have nice things™
  • binlog
    Turns out competition works!
  • Hamuko
    Epic Games seems desperate in its attempts to make gamers like AI.
  • square_usual
    This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
  • zug_zug
    Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
  • ChrisArchitect
  • Capricorn2481
    Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
  • dualvariable
    "avoid stealing focus..."oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.
  • Svoka
    Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
  • dyauspitr
    I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
  • viccis
    Wake me up when it stops going blank when I have two monitors with different scaling factors. [1]1: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4299321840544...
  • jaydeeplx
    [flagged]
  • josefresco
    Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
  • xpct
    The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.