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Why FitGirl won't die: The repacker millions of gamers depend on in an age of surveillance (www.tbsnews.net)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 45 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Steam gets around this problem by doing the decompressing on the fly as you download. Go check out your CPU usage next time you install a game.

Edit: I think this is also why it defaults to not downloading while you game. Steam doesn't want you to have a bad experience from the decompression.

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    More like check your hdd. Steam goes like this for me download, download, download, pause downloading to extract and smash my hdd, download, download, downloand.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah I think it ends up waiting for slower storage if your cpu or HDD are too slow. I experience that with slower sdcards on the Deck.

    But on a decent NVMe with a balanced CPU the download and disk are full bore and the CPU usage goes really high.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Ahh yeah this could be. My system isn't by any means crazy but it is modern. A tuned 5600x (draws about 115W at full load) and an nvme 3.0 ssd. I'm being bottlenecked by internet bandwidth at the moment.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Is this why steam is so insanely slow to download games.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    It will also use ALL your bandwidth by default. I can't even watch a yt video or anything while doing a steam download unless I limit the bandwidth in settings.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    What kind of router do you have? If it has any kind of "smart queue" or "smart qos" you could try enabling that and it will de-prioritize steam's packets (as needed) so that web browsing and voip still work.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Awesome thank you for the tip. I'm not too well versed in networking so I never really dig around in my router settings. I'm just using the Modem/router supplied by the ISP right now and it doesn't look like it has anything like that from a quick look through the config page.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago*

    Ahh yeah the provided router might not have some of the more advanced features. But suffice to say this isn't so much a steam problem as it is a "how computer networks work" problem. The way routers work by default tends to penalize "bursty" traffic like loading websites/gaming/voice and prioritize sustained traffic like your download, so it's nice that valve provide the option to limit the bandwidth. I'm on satellite internet right now waiting for verizon to finish their fiber install and I can't even use that reliably because my bandwidth changes constantly D=

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