preload is a trap. don't do it

[Vayne]

Downloading when the game out is much more faster

[dustin1280]

Originally posted by MyCabbages:

These threads are so bizarre. Just an army of children bragging about the fast internet their parents bought.

It has nothing to do with that.

I mean sure, some people might want to brag about their internet connection. But the majority of these topics are to prevent people with good internet from making the mistake of preloading

[Diviance]

Originally posted by dustin1280:

Originally posted by MyCabbages:

These threads are so bizarre. Just an army of children bragging about the fast internet their parents bought.

It has nothing to do with that.

I mean sure, some people might want to brag about their internet connection. But the majority of these topics are to prevent people with good internet from making the mistake of preloading

Preloading is a good idea if the game is popular or it comes out on a day with a bunch of good stuff, since people downloading those will slow down the CDN's.

And if you have high end hardware with a fast SSD, then decrypting a preload can be faster than downloading, depending upon your download speed.

I mean, your machine has to decrypt the download either way. Non-pre-loads just do it on the fly while downloading.

[dustin1280]

Originally posted by Diviance:

Originally posted by dustin1280:

It has nothing to do with that.

I mean sure, some people might want to brag about their internet connection. But the majority of these topics are to prevent people with good internet from making the mistake of preloading

Preloading is a good idea if the game is popular or it comes out on a day with a bunch of good stuff, since people downloading those will slow down the CDN's.

And if you have high end hardware with a fast SSD, then decrypting a preload can be faster than downloading, depending upon your download speed.

I mean, your machine has to decrypt the download either way. Non-pre-loads just do it on the fly while downloading.

There is no decryption with non-preloads, just unpacking which is an entirely different thing

Unpacking is what is done "on the fly" during non-preload.

Decrypting only happens on preloaded copies and takes longer than a fast download the majority of the time

[Diviance]

https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-download-system/

They are both encrypted. It is the same files.

[N-X]

Pretty sure pre-loading would not be offered if it were a worse alternative. That would kinda be a troll move on Valve's part.

[dustin1280]

Originally posted by Diviance:

https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-download-system/

They are both encrypted. It is the same files.

Ahh thanks you for that... I honestly didn't realize it was truly on the fly decryption...

That said, they ARE different processes and take SIGNIFICANTLY different amounts of times (preload decryption vs download decryption)

If you can download the game in 20 minutes or less there is a 90% chance that you will be able to play it faster then decrypting a predownload

Originally posted by N-X:

Pretty sure pre-loading would not be offered if it were a worse alternative. That would kinda be a troll move on Valve's part.

Preload is NOT a worse alternative for people that have unstable or slow internet connections, its the BEST alternative....

But if you have a fast stable connection, downloading is faster the majority of the time.

[Diviance]

Well, it is the same technical process, just on the fly doesn't need to rely on the read/write speeds of your disk. Just the write speed.

Which is why decrypting murders an HDD. But an SSD, if it is really fast (because yes, they do make slow SSD's, which is freaking stupid), it can really fly through the decryption with a high end CPU.

Downloading can be faster with a fast internet. But it does depend on things.

I also didn't know it was the same stuff until I saw that.

[dustin1280]

I can agree that it depends on things, but would you say for the majority of people, if they can download the game in 20 minutes or less, then they are better off NOT-preloading.

Because the majority of people don't necessarily know the specifics of their CPU and SSD speeds.

That is what I am getting at, a good rule of thumb is if download speed is 20 minutes or less than downloading instead of preloading is to your advantage.

[Diviance]

For a big game, if you have fast internet and it isn't like the CDN's will be hammered, downloading rather than preloading is the way to go.

If it isn't a particularly big game, I don't think it matters. It will go by real fast either way.

[Holychit]

Anyone with an SSD should be fine.

[Xengre]

Originally posted by Xengre:

Originally posted by Tiasmoon:

Its more CPU related~



Its not going to take seconds in any case. A faster connection is going to be more helpful then a faster PC in this case.

Unless downloading takes more then 1-2 hours, id download. If it takes 30m at most, then downloading is most likely to be faster.

Unless Steam changed how pre-load works in the last few years since I haven't really pre-ordered much to say for sure last I recall it just downloaded the game (which I've already done in a few minutes time) and now that I have it downloaded the release will just pass me the decryption key and then my CPU and drive will work to decrypt the game which no longer needs my internet at that point. The decryption process should only take a few seconds with a particularly high end CPU/NVME (Ryzen 9 3950X and 7,500MB/s seq. read and 6,850MB/s seq. write). Of course, I'm assuming their API for the decryption isn't total garbage and can at least use a couple threads from my CPU and isn't I/O bottlenecked by a bad API, but I could be wrong as I haven't really trusted pre-ordering for many years and thus don't know for sure hence my initial assumption. I guess I shall see.

Hmmm guess pre-load was the right idea for me. Wasn't a few seconds it seems but took just around 3 minutes which isn't too bad.

[Digihuman]

For me there's no difference.
Preload would take just shy of an hour, fresh install takes just shy of an hour. Either way I can't play tonight.

[Mazzle Dazzle]

I always preload so the servers don't get overloaded with people downloading at the same time.

[sling_shot]

Downloading is faster.

The decompression can slow the entire process down depending on your storage.

HDD users shouldn't pre-load a 30GB game.

[Mazzle Dazzle]

Originally posted by Point Man:

Downloading is faster.

The decompression can slow the entire process down depending on your storage.

HDD users shouldn't pre-load a 30GB game.

I'm aware its faster. But its better for steam's health and the the network in general to not have everyone download at the same time.