Why are my downloads on Steam so slow compared to other launchers?

[Conclusive]

I'm trying to update some games on Steam, but then it hits a Verifying status, and it takes much longer compared to the download itself. I have downloaded games on Epic, Ubisoft, the Game Pass and all of them download with no issue at all and fairly quickly. But it's just Steam that has issues whenever I download or update something.

Does anyone know why or how to fix this if there is a solution?

I am downloading on a HDD which I am told upgrading to an SSD might help, but again all other launchers I use have no problem downloading to the drive compared to Steam.

[Ettanin]

For speeds beyond 100 MBit/s (~10 MByte/s) you need a non-DRAM-less SSD, ideally a m.2 NVMe drive.

Steam does four steps during patching:
Decrypt and decompress the chunk, then write the unpacked chunk down.
Move the old file.
Merge the file with the chunk by reading from both sources and writing down the updated file.
Delete the old file.

Finally, the entirely installed game will be verified against the manifest description to ensure no defects remain after patching.

This is very I/O intensive and slow on HDDs.

[Conclusive]

Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still curious how come this doesn't happen in the other launchers? Even when the games need an update it is much quicker than Steam.

[nullable]

Originally posted by Conclusive:

Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still curious how come this doesn't happen in the other launchers? Even when the games need an update it is much quicker than Steam.

How Steam manages downloads and updates may be different than other launchers. I mean from the user perspective you're just downloading something. But there's a lot of details in what's happen while you're downloading. Steam is doing work while the download is happening. Other launchers may prefer to download all the data first and then do the work. Different implementations may have different behaviors.

Some of this may have to do with Steam pre-dating most other launchers by years. Decisions that made sense in 2003 might be different now, and if some of those systems haven't been completely re-written you can see the consequences of twenty year old decisions sometimes.

[Ettanin]

Originally posted by Conclusive:

Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still curious how come this doesn't happen in the other launchers? Even when the games need an update it is much quicker than Steam.

The other launchers lack the sophisticated system Steam uses. If something goes haywire with them, your only option is to redownload the entire game. Steam spares you from this fate by detecting which files are defective and only download the files that are defective.

[nullable]

That being said, running a good SSD, and a 1GB connection I don't have a a problem hitting 100MB/sec.

But some people do seem to have issues. There are some DRAMless SSDs that by default don't seem to work well with Steam, but sometimes that can be fixed with configuration.

But arguably the issue is the users system (although it could be a network issue, or an ISP issue too).

[Conclusive]

I do plan to upgrade to an SSD eventually, I'll just suck it up for now and wait out the updates then. Thanks everyone!

[Saeko]

Originally posted by Ettanin:

For speeds beyond 100 MBit/s (~10 MByte/s) you need a non-DRAM-less SSD, ideally a m.2 NVMe drive.

Steam does four steps during patching:
Decrypt and decompress the chunk, then write the unpacked chunk down.
Move the old file.
Merge the file with the chunk by reading from both sources and writing down the updated file.
Delete the old file.

Finally, the entirely installed game will be verified against the manifest description to ensure no defects remain after patching.

This is very I/O intensive and slow on HDDs.

hey what do i do if this still happens i just built a relatively high end pc

Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Processor
RAM
32.0GB
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. PRIME Z790-A WIFI (LGA1700) 33 °C
Graphics
ROG PG27V (2560x1440@120Hz)
VX239 (1920x1080@60Hz)
4087MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (ASUStek Computer Inc) 35 °C
Storage
1863GB NVMe Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB (RAID (SSD))
Optical Drives
No optical disk drives detected
Audio
NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM)

ookla speed test (Australian 1-7 MB's is slow 12-18 is considered fast for me atleast)


DOWNLOAD Mbps
108.36 - 13.545 MB
UPLOAD Mbps
18.76 - 2.345 MB
Ping ms 10

in my region or atleast to me this was my normal speed in my old build

idk why my speeds are so slow now and so far its on epic launcher and steam but not on ubisoft or riot clients

why is it only ♥♥♥♥ on steam and not others i cannot for the life of me figure this out i need like crazy help here

[Connie]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.