alt Hacker NewsSteam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher
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> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated
I've been using Rare for a couple of years, never had a problem. It's much more lightweight and fast.
Epic is so bad that I rather pay for a game on Steam than getting it for free on their store.
So it's a D-measuring contest now? Also, I found the tone of the writing on that site, including the picture of Gabe Newell, kind of obnoxious.
The problem with advertising "vibe coding" is that anyone can do it.
What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
If this is the start of epic competing on features and quality for both devs and players instead of just buying up exclusive rights then I'm all for it
I don't know why anyone's assuming Valve isn't "vibe coding" too.
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
> Your country is not allowed to access this resource
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
App to launch apps is loading in little over 5s, on what I assume is high-end gaming pc.
Truly something to be proud of..
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
It is fast though!
It is incredibly funny that Steam could have fixed this at any time, but didn't prioritise doing so until Epic openly challenged them. This is why we can't have nice things™
on the flipside, it takes longer to start the steam client than it does to load and start the first level in half life
Next let's review their RAM usage while idle, shall we?
It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
epic games can build a launcher that has hard coded bytes and runs on it's own localized cpu space and I would still use steam
Not sure why this is even a comparison. Steam Client has been optimized over years of development and updates.
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Epic will do anything to beat Valve, apart from actually being better than Valve
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?
that is great and all but why was it slow previously
I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
They're posting this as some kind of gotcha against AI, as if Valve aren't using AI too.
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
Turns out competition works!
Epic Games seems desperate in its attempts to make gamers like AI.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
"avoid stealing focus..."
oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
Wake me up when it stops going blank when I have two monitors with different scaling factors. [1]
1: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4299321840544...
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Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.