Does steam cap download speed??

[llREDACTEDll]

My internet is more than capable of getting download speeds of 70-90mb/s down (50-60mb/s down if i'm watching youtube)
Yet steam seems capped at 15mb/s down

Its getting annoying when downloading games that should take a few minutes take 4 times as long because of this cap.
No other service has this issue

I am using WiFi but still nothing else has the issue.

Is there any way to fix this or does steam have a capped download speed?

[mimizukari]

No, it doesn't cap your download speed. Your speed is slower than you think it is. Divide your mb/s speed by 8 and that's what you get, (speed test 90 mb/s for example will be 11.25 MB/s)

[Fear dot Com]

Pff...I wish I had download speeds that good! :P But yeah, you tried using different regions? The one in my own hometown is utter crap (like 20 kb/s) but switching it to Finland oddly enough gets me 2 mb/s. Either that, or Finland is just that awesome.

[llREDACTEDll]

Originally posted by リーゼロッタ:

No, it doesn't cap your download speed. Your speed is slower than you think it is. Divide your mb/s speed by 8 and that's what you get, (speed test 90 mb/s for example will be 11.25 MB/s)

Well see thats the thing, Its not. Right now I'm downloading Gears of war 4 on the microsoft store at 60mb/s
Its downloading really fast. Whereas downloading Middle earth shadow of war on steam (a similarly sized game over 120gigs) took a stupid amount of time


and my speed is 300mbps so thatd be 37.5mb/s Still twice as fast as what steam gives

[MonkehMaster]

steam has issues with download speeds, sometimes you get your max speed and other times you get squat, and very often it just plain drops to 0 for no reason.

this doesnt include the crappy "preallocation" nonsense that everyone is sick of.

[Satoru]

1) steam does not cap downloads speeds
2) steam can obliterate 1gbps connections

Your issues are likely

1) you are CPU limitedd
2) you are IO limited

[Spawn of Totoro]

OP:

Can you go to https://www.speedtest.net/ and link your results?

[AK]

I feel like speedtest.net gives you maximum, not optimum. Speed test gave me 800 MBPS but the actual download speed from both Blizzard's Battle.net and Steam is just 50 MBPS.
I think the 1/8th method works great for determining this.

[mimizukari]

Originally posted by aksrox1802:

I feel like speedtest.net gives you maximum, not optimum. Speed test gave me 800 MBPS but the actual download speed from both Blizzard's Battle.net and Steam is just 50 MBPS.
I think the 1/8th method works great for determining this.

no, speedtest gives you 800 mb/s not MB/s, MB/s is when you divide by 8, mb/s is the larger undivided number.

800 mb/s is 100 MB/s

[llREDACTEDll]

Originally posted by Satoru:

1) steam does not cap downloads speeds
2) steam can obliterate 1gbps connections

Your issues are likely

1) you are CPU limitedd
2) you are IO limited

My CPU is an i7 3770 and i dont understand what you mean by IO limited

[llREDACTEDll]

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

OP:

Can you go to https://www.speedtest.net/ and link your results?

https://www.speedtest.net/result/8018970646.png

It's being limited likely by the wifi module on my mobo or just spotty service right now.
If it was this speed then steam capping at 15MB/s would make sense but still doesn't explain why steam is the only platform with this issue.

My Xbox dowwnloads games at the full speed, every other game launcher except steam is the same.Far above 15MB/s

[999999999]

Originally posted by llREDACTEDll:

https://www.speedtest.net/result/8018970646.png

90mb/s = 11.25MB/s

Steam defaults to MB/s.

Steam > Settings > Downloads >>> Display download rates in bit per second

Now tell us what you get on Steam

[Satoru]

Originally posted by llREDACTEDll:

Originally posted by Satoru:

1) steam does not cap downloads speeds
2) steam can obliterate 1gbps connections

Your issues are likely

1) you are CPU limitedd
2) you are IO limited

My CPU is an i7 3770 and i dont understand what you mean by IO limited

Steam downloads are

1) done in chunks that need to be recombined
2) compressed
3) patching downloads only the deltas and applies them to the source file

Thus downloads are predominatnly CPU/IO limited as steam

1) downloads a chunk
2) decompresses the file
3) reads the source file for patching
4) writes out the destintaion file while calculating the patching deltas
5) writes the destination file to the target

Your downloads by and large are limited by your CPU speed and disk IO

Other downloads are not compressed and don't require CPU cycles to decompress/recombine/patch which is why its 'faster'.

[eatnogoat]

Thanks everyone! This discussion saved me some headache this evening. I was having the same confusion getting mad about 14MBps but it's over 100 Mbps, which is super as far as I'm concerned. Cheers.

[The Stivonator]

Changing the download region worked wonders for me. I was trying to download Destiny 2 which is a 90 gb game but my download speed was capped at 1.2 mb/s. I changed my download region and my download speed went all the way up to 6 mb/s. Hope this helps anybody out there :)

[Gas]

I believe they do. I live right next to one of their pops in CA and if I download a large game (20-90GB), when I first launch I start at 60MB/s (that's bytes, I have 1Gbps fiber) and it drops down to exactly 11MB/s. I've traced the ips through tcp view and it swaps providers after about 5 seconds. I've selected each region and it's the same type of depreciation of speed. Even if it isn't intentional, the system they have set up does it.