STEAM blocks game download speed

[NovvYouSeeMe]

welcome
i have a question why when downloading games from STEAM the speed is 30-40mb/s and on other platforms it uses 100-120mb/s

[Sergeant Tuff-Stuff]

It's about as good as it gets,I'm afraid.No matter how high YOUR internet speed is,Steam's servers can only push out so much speed back to you.It's all due to the heavy traffic that its servers endure.One thing that might help is to check exactly from what city you are getting your downloads from.The closer you are,the better the speed back is.

[ReBoot]

Steam can saturate my 100Mb/s connection just fine. Try a couple different download servers. Emphasis on "couple", last time I had download issues, it took me 3 attempts to, well, saturate my 100Mb/s connection.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Sergeant Tuff-Stuff:

It's about as good as it gets,I'm afraid.No matter how high YOUR internet speed is,Steam's servers can only push out so much speed back to you.It's all due to the heavy traffic that its servers endure.One thing that might help is to check exactly from what city you are getting your downloads from.The closer you are,the better the speed back is.

Steam can obliterate 1gbps connections

Steam was pushing out 1.5 petabytes/sec during the CP2077 launch

Your steam downloads are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk io
3) your antivirus
4) your ISP

pick one

[laxiorr xyz.gg]

sssss

[NovvYouSeeMe]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Originally posted by Sergeant Tuff-Stuff:

It's about as good as it gets,I'm afraid.No matter how high YOUR internet speed is,Steam's servers can only push out so much speed back to you.It's all due to the heavy traffic that its servers endure.One thing that might help is to check exactly from what city you are getting your downloads from.The closer you are,the better the speed back is.

Steam can obliterate 1gbps connections

Steam was pushing out 1.5 petabytes/sec during the CP2077 launch

Your steam downloads are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk io
3) your antivirus
4) your ISP

pick one

ok then why in Epic Game or Ubisoft it downloads at maximum speed??

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by NovvYouSeeMe:

ok then why in Epic Game or Ubisoft it downloads at maximum speed??

My guess would be they're not compressing the data like Steam is, which they can afford to do because their traffic is several orders of magnitude smaller. Hosting those downloads isn't free, and there are hundreds of millions of Steam users.

This Linus video demonstrates the situation well:
https://youtu.be/8N3sFRR9-OE?t=891

Super low-end crappy laptop. They wanted to test gaming, but the CPU was too slow to unpack the files in any reasonable amount of time. I'm sure the Internet at LTT is plenty fast, but the computer itself proved to be a bottleneck.

[NovvYouSeeMe]

Originally posted by Harusp3x:

Originally posted by NovvYouSeeMe:

ok then why in Epic Game or Ubisoft it downloads at maximum speed??

My guess would be they're not compressing the data like Steam is, which they can afford to do because their traffic is several orders of magnitude smaller. Hosting those downloads isn't free, and there are hundreds of millions of Steam users.

This Linus video demonstrates the situation well:
https://youtu.be/8N3sFRR9-OE?t=891

Super low-end crappy laptop. They wanted to test gaming, but the CPU was too slow to unpack the files in any reasonable amount of time. I'm sure the Internet at LTT is plenty fast, but the computer itself proved to be a bottleneck.

that is my computer does not meet the requirements for the "use" of steam but I can play hogwarts legacy in 4k in high quality and in 80-100 fps?

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by NovvYouSeeMe:

that is my computer does not meet the requirements for the "use" of steam but I can play hogwarts legacy in 4k in high quality and in 80-100 fps?

I'm not suggesting that you're using a $140 craptop, and that's why your downloads are slow. Your hardware is one factor in your download speeds, and while faster hardware makes for faster downloads, it still needs time to decompress those files. There are several other factors too, like download region, aggressive real time anti-virus, disk type, etc.

[NovvYouSeeMe]

Originally posted by Harusp3x:

Originally posted by NovvYouSeeMe:

that is my computer does not meet the requirements for the "use" of steam but I can play hogwarts legacy in 4k in high quality and in 80-100 fps?

I'm not suggesting that you're using a $140 craptop, and that's why your downloads are slow. Your hardware is one factor in your download speeds, and while faster hardware makes for faster downloads, it still needs time to decompress those files. There are several other factors too, like download region, aggressive real time anti-virus, disk type, etc.

ill have to check on another computer

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by NovvYouSeeMe:

Originally posted by Satoru:

Steam can obliterate 1gbps connections

Steam was pushing out 1.5 petabytes/sec during the CP2077 launch

Your steam downloads are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk io
3) your antivirus
4) your ISP

pick one

ok then why in Epic Game or Ubisoft it downloads at maximum speed??

Because Steam works differently.

Steam works where all games are downloaded both encrypted and compressed. For this reason it can really be an issue if you have a weaker PC, or connection.

So it typically downloads a chunk to your drive, then stops, unpacks and sorts the data in that chunk, then writes it to it's final position on the drive, before returning to downloading the next chunk.

So, if you have a slower hard drive, or not so much RAM, or a weak I/O, or CPU and so on, then it can affect your speed greatly. The point here is it IS NOT just your connection that can cause the bottlenec.

But it's easy to check this - go to the downloads page, and check the graph while it's downloading. You will see the connection speed, disc activity and so on. Open Windows Task Manager and see what is happening with all your system resources, and if you do have an issue you might see where the problem is if say, your RAM is hitting heavy usage.