- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
On machines where you start Steam manually in order to play a game, do you keep Steam running in the background after play session is over? Meaning if you no longer play any game for the moment, and just keep it running to be ready. Or do you close Steam, after the play session?
I can’t believe so many people here autorun it.
Steam is, objectively, a chonky boi. If I’m not actively using it, why would I want it slowing down what I am actually doing? What’s the upside?
And to be specific, I’m not concerned with RAM usage personally, but interrupts, CPU, networking, vram…
It doesn’t. It did when I was using a 10 year old non-gaming laptop, yeah. On my main PC it’s not noticeable at all.
I’m not downvoting anyone here, but I will say just because you don’t notice, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect.
I have a 7800X3D, 3090, 128GB RAM, NVMe SSD, all tuned and running on a “stripped down” Windows install, and I used some benchmarking scripts for Stellaris and Modded Minecraft that I already used for other stuff. Background churn absolutely affected frame time consistency (hitching) and simulation speed.
I imagine it would be even more dramatic for a game that saturates the whole CPU, like Cyberpunk 2077 or something, though I have not tested that empirically. And this testing was on Windows; certain schedulers on Linux (like CachyOS offers) might handle background churn better, though there will always be a tradeoff.
Frame times are notoriously fickle. All it takes are two tasks that are intensive for 1/60th of a second to be run at once to get a spike. The key is how noticeable are the spikes?
Most of the things you removed to strip down windows probably have much more of an impact than steam, and the 500mb of ram it uses does.
I use my PC pretty exclusively for gaming so I actually prefer it to autorun. I don’t notice any difference in performance with it off honestly.
deleted by creator
So my friends can see that I’m online and invite me. Also updating my games in the background.
And my PC is powerful enough that I don’t notice any kind of slowdown from Steam running in the background anyways.
Me too. I’m actually a bit shocked. The reason why I started this poll is, because I recently saw lot of YouTube people saying they always run it in the background (because of the defense about Steam starting slow, versus the new Epic Games launcher). So I was curious if that is a thing most do.
Also one of the reasons I close it is, it somewhat interferes with gamepads I am using outside Steam. Just one of the reasons.
Also, privacy and security. It’s just good practice not to autorun anything unless you absolutely have to, especially something with as much exposed “area” as a popular client with so many features.
This is a hot take, but I think the tendency to autorun Steam… familiarity?
People like Steam. It’s positive. It’s “on their side” and known, and it auto runs by default, so they aren’t particularly inclined to change that.
I could not care less about how I feel about Steam. I care about the resource utilization I measured and see with my two eyeballs, and I don’t like it one bit. Heck, I’d much rather it not run even while I’m gaming, if I can help it.
For me gaming is the only thing my computer does where the performance actually matters, in pretty much all other things I use it for the performance impact is imperceptible. The only time I might close it is if I was trying to run some benchmark or something.
I don’t like the overhead games either, TBH. This is why I try to buy GoG absolutely wherever I can; no launcher, no DRM, no overhead.
Unfortunately, a lot of games aren’t on GoG, or are even Steam-exclusive now…