Any tips for improving Steam performance?

[Buggy Boy]

Running on up to date Windows 10 Pro 22H2
12th Gen i7-12700H 2.30GHz
16GB RAM
nVME main drive
NVidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU

The system runs fine until I open the Steam client (I can't have it running in the background because...) the system then chugs and stutters, but as soon as I close Steam it runs fine again. Nothing much to see in Task Manager so I don't know what's going on. Other applications run fine. Difficult to tell with games as most are run through Steam, and Steam seems to be giving me problems when it's running which also makes Steam games run choppy.

I have MSI Afterburner installed, is there anything I should be looking for or are there any optimal settings for Steam for laptop users? Any Windows settings or configurations I can look at to help?

Thanks.

[Eagle_of_Fire]

That's a laptop and the CPU is sub par.

Go into settings -> Library. Make sure the trio of "Low Bandwith Mode", "Low Performance Mode" and "Disable Community Content" are on.

Edit: I would also completely disable the overlay and only turn it on if you actually need it for some reason.

[Eocene]

The Steam client is an absolutely horrible piece of software. It has no excuse to not be lightning fast on even ghetto PC's, and yet it isn't, at all.

I just exposed a problem with it in another thread. Every time you open a game page, it has to load in art assets. (logo, header, etc).

Before, these assets were stored in their respective folders in appcache/librarycache, so the game's page could refer directly to them.

A recent update changed this. Now, these assets are stored under subfolders with obfuscating names. So, whenever Steam needs to load these assets, it needs to run code to retrieve the path to these assets. Since I am unable to find these directory names anywhere, I am guessing Valve stores them in their proprietary VDF formatted binary files.

So, each time it needs to load an image, it now needs to do a lot of work (load in binary file, de-binarize it, parse the value it needs) before it even knows the path of the asset to load.

Even when these resources are locally cached (as they should be), it doesn't matter in practice because Steam is designed so badly it doesn't display them until all the unnecessary HTML fluff is done loading.

PC's are capable of this magical thing called 'threading'. Clearly, the Steam devs are unaware of this feature.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Valve has absolutely no concern for making Steam a snappy experience. They don't care, why should they? It's making them billions.

I invite any Valve software engineer to step up and discuss this with me. I doubt any of them will have the courage.

[pckirk]

Originally posted by Eocene:

I invite any Valve software engineer to step up and discuss this with me. I doubt any of them will have the courage.

There are no valve / steam employees or staff, server techs, steam support, or moderators in this steam related sub-forum. This is a user to user only steam sub-forum.

[Mad Scientist]

Originally posted by Eocene:

The Steam client is an absolutely horrible piece of software. It has no excuse to not be lightning fast on even ghetto PC's, and yet it isn't, at all.

It's faster than most clients, and with extra options disabled it can run really well especially on low end CPUs. Laptop CPUs and GPUs are not like their full-size counterparts.

Originally posted by Eocene:

I just exposed a problem with it in another thread. Every time you open a game page, it has to load in art assets. (logo, header, etc).

KB's of data, or low-end MB's is not exactly a problem. Loads of the entire internet works exactly like that.

Originally posted by Eocene:

PC's are capable of this magical thing called 'threading'. Clearly, the Steam devs are unaware of this feature.

Doesn't seem like it matters that much either as it's not a rendering program or anything that would particularly have serious advantages.

Originally posted by Eocene:

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Valve has absolutely no concern for making Steam a snappy experience. They don't care, why should they? It's making them billions.

I've previously posted the resource use, loading times etc of multiple clients, with EGS being the absolute slowest, least "snappy" experience yet having almost no features compared to the steam client. I alos have ubi, ea, gog etc and steam is still one of the fastest for most if not all tasks. One can also disable certain features if they want the fastest and lest resource use as possible too.

Originally posted by Eocene:

I invite any Valve software engineer to step up and discuss this with me. I doubt any of them will have the courage.

That sort of thing doesn't work on them.
Been at this for a year now?

As for the OP, do this;

Originally posted by Eagle_of_Fire:

That's a laptop and the CPU is sub par.

Go into settings -> Library. Make sure the trio of "Low Bandwith Mode", "Low Performance Mode" and "Disable Community Content" are on.

Edit: I would also completely disable the overlay and only turn it on if you actually need it for some reason.

Works wonders for laptops, and lower end cpus.

[Buggy Boy]

Thanks, I’ll try that trio of low resource settings.

And I agree - all of these game library / launcher clients can and should be lightning fast, the system should hardly know they are running, but it certainly feels like they’ve just been bloated without care, like most other software out there today. Don’t get me wrong, the steam client does some very nice things, but I just think it could be done much better.

[Buggy Boy]

I checked - those low resource settings were already enabled and yet Steam still chunks along like treacle for even the most basic tasks such as scrolling through the Library or Store pages, pausing seemingly at regular intervals, stuttering even when just typing this response, effectively making it unusable.

Checking Task Manager I see Steam Client WebHelper using about 5-8% CPU, 675MB RAM, and for some inexplicable reason a small % of GPU time as well. There are no 3D elements on display here, this is just text in a text box on a forum. Weird!