Downloading While Gaming

[Orca MS15LF]

I've installed Steam into a new laptop. Can somebody remind me of the setting so that I can download games while playing one? Thanks.

[Iceira]

Are yuo even in the client , and Not a Browser, maybe thats the issue then most steam user know steam settings is in the client.

You know all them buzz words on the topic that why it look strange you did not do this by yourself.

[Callahan420]

Steam > Settings > Downloads

[Satoru]

Note that this is generally not recommended. Steam downloads and patching are very CPU and disk IO intensive. If you allow this you can encounter issues such as

* Lower FPS
* game stutters
* texture pop ins
* slow load times

If you really want to enable this go to

Steam->Settings->Downloads->"Allow downloads during gameplay"

Again note that doing so will, in general, have a detrimental effect on your games performance. Use at your own peril

[Orca MS15LF]

Originally posted by Callahan420:

Steam > Settings > Downloads

Thanks.

[Orca MS15LF]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Note that this is generally not recommended. Steam downloads and patching are very CPU and disk IO intensive. If you allow this you can encounter issues such as

* Lower FPS
* game stutters
* texture pop ins
* slow load times

If you really want to enable this go to

Steam->Settings->Downloads->"Allow downloads during gameplay"

Again note that doing so will, in general, have a detrimental effect on your games performance. Use at your own peril

Thanks for that info. I'll turn it back off.

[batubabaxx]

Go to Settings > Downloads > Press the button next to "Allow downloadsd during game".

You might have lower FPS and slower connection, its all up to your router and computer. You're welcome!

[nullable]

Originally posted by Orca MS15LF:

Originally posted by Satoru:

Note that this is generally not recommended. Steam downloads and patching are very CPU and disk IO intensive. If you allow this you can encounter issues such as

* Lower FPS
* game stutters
* texture pop ins
* slow load times

If you really want to enable this go to

Steam->Settings->Downloads->"Allow downloads during gameplay"

Again note that doing so will, in general, have a detrimental effect on your games performance. Use at your own peril

Thanks for that info. I'll turn it back off.

While this is technically true, if your PC/laptop is powerful enough it may not be noticeable. I've had the option enabled for years and can't really recall a time where it caused an issue. But I'm generally running in high-end or mid-highend range, so usually have power to spare.

And I would say as with many things there's no one size fits all right answer. And nothing is stopping you from testing how much impact, if any, you notice. If you're playing a low demand game it may be a moot point. If your PC is powerful enough it may be a moot point. If a game runs slightly worse than normal, but it otherwise playable and it doesn't bother you, it's a moot point.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by nullable:

Originally posted by Orca MS15LF:

Thanks for that info. I'll turn it back off.

While this is technically true, if your PC/laptop is powerful enough it may not be noticeable. I've had the option enabled for years and can't really recall a time where it caused an issue. But I'm generally running in high-end or mid-highend range, so usually have power to spare.

And I would say as with many things there's no one size fits all right answer. And nothing is stopping you from testing how much impact, if any, you notice. If you're playing a low demand game it may be a moot point. If your PC is powerful enough it may be a moot point. If a game runs slightly worse than normal, but it otherwise playable and it doesn't bother you, it's a moot point.

It honestly depends on the game. For example these effects are much more noticeable in open world games such as GTA or AC games. This is because the games assets are being constantly streamed to your system. Having IO contention on this creates very weird pop in effects as the disk cant keep up with requests to stream the game assets. This gets worse during patching as a lot of bad consumer level AV (anything other than MS Defender) constantly locks and re-reads the downloaded and patched files.

If you're playing something like GTAV and Payday2 decides to update in the background and you're running AVG, even in a multi-core CPU system with SSD drives, you can end up in a pretty bad state of affairs.

The other issue is more that these issues tend to be random and transient, which is actually sort of worse from a gaming perpsective. Like if your FPS just dropped from 60 to 40fps consistently that would be at most annoying. But during downloads it might flip flop significantly with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Texture pop ins might happen then magically fix themselves. Your game might be fine during walking exploration, then randomly begin stuttering during fights or vice versa. The irony being that consistent bad performance is actually more tolerable than the kinds of random performance problems that can happen. And you're much more liekly to blame the game for this, rather than remembering "oh yeah I enabled that weird setting 2 months ago"