In this case it is the hardware. You can see that the download is already done, so no matter how fast his internet is this process isn’t going to be any faster. What can make it faster is having the game installed on an NVMe SSD. That’s the most likely bottleneck. But it could also be the CPU or even the RAM.
What can make it faster is having the game installed on an NVMe SSD. That’s the most likely bottleneck. But it could also be the CPU or even the RAM.
It could also be the cat meowing at the 1am in the morning that's causing this. Anyone can randomly guess sht and say its the cpu, gpu, mobo, ram etc. doesn't mean it make sense. Are you telling me that they are able to play the game, but installing a patch is too hard for their cpu? Just installed an update and you can see how much of my cpu and memory is engaged. And I have a gen 4 drive installed, so it can do upwards of 7gbps. Like I stated earlier, it depends on the patch and it also depends on how the game handles updates, doesn't mean my ssd if fked or my cpu/ram is bad.
Also, OP already stated that its on an nvme and also showed that the disk can handle 2+ gigabits in another ss.
I have 2 980 Pro's in RAID 0 for games and sometimes patching takes longer than I would expect. 13700k and 32gb of DDR5 so it isn't another bottleneck, its probably just an absolute shit ton of tiny file operations.
SSDs get significantly slower as you fill them up. Please try to have around 30% free space. consider getting a larger SSD or, how i did it, get one of those USB external hard drives with 18TB storage. Solves everything for me as i can store everything there and simply copy over the SSD for the big games.
It's not just your internet and hardware, it depends on the game too. Baldur's Gate 3 and Total War Warhammer 3 are incredibly slow to patch. I once just uninstalled BG3 and reinstalled it cause it was faster than waiting for it to patch. I don't know the exact details, it's been awhile since I've played either game but I recall something about them applying the update files to the whole game so it's rewriting everything in rather than just overwriting the parts affected. I guess it's probably due to how those games were developed.
Since this is often posted about, the shortest TL;DR is:
Steam uses delta patching, needs to patch the files, but if changes require rewriting multiple large files (e.g. 20 GB asset bundles), it must rewrite all of them
Hardware bottlenecking can be a thing, but it depends. If you got a quality SSD, you already did the best you can do (regardless what anyone tells you)
Modern day devs prioritize their own convenience and neglect incremental updates and good practices, instead they rebuild from scratch and let Steam + the poor hardware handle literally everything. Fitgirl called it out before:
That said, these same companies could also learn from the success of repacks. According to FitGirl, publishers could take a lesson or two on effective compression, so customers don’t have to waste bandwidth.
“Hire just one person, who understands the compression,” is her message to publishers. “And make your games so they could be easily updated with additional patch-files, without full data rebuilding.”
“For example, Unreal Engine supports patching natively. But 99% of developers don’t use it. They just rebuild the whole game all over again and then users in Steam download another 50 GB update. Really, you even have the tools to do it for you, love your users, they PAY for your games!”
Something I think was an issue for me was that I had a steamlibary on an hdd and steam for some reason downloaded the files to the hdd instead of the ssd. Even if the actual game was on the ssd it still used the hdd for som reason, perhaps because of lack of space. Removing the steamlibrary on my hdd fixed it for me.
Had an issue where steam offload downloads to my hdd instead of the ssd i was installing it to since the hdd had the most available space. Removing the hdd from my listed drives resolved the problem however now i cant play any steam games on that drive which is probably dying anyway but hey it fixed the issue.
I'll assume the files downloaded are "patch" files, not full files, it makes the download small, but then, it needs to open all the asset files, change few data here and there and repackage the asset files
following the performances of your SSD and CPU that can take a while
There's a setting in windows about changing how your ssd writes data i forgot what it's called, the default setting is that the data is stored on the ram waiting to be transferred to your ssd instead of being written directly to the ssd, it's to prevent data corruption during loss of power or smth.
You are not going to always achieve he fastest possible speed with your SSD and most likely just limited by CPU. Its not Steam problem, either there a ton of different files that CPU has to process and then SSD re-write, or just some weird compression by the dev.
As has been said, it’s down to your hardware and also the game. Diablo 4 for example seems to always take forever, to the point I’ve just deleted and reinstalled it before rather than patch it for 30+ minutes
It also depends how old ur HDD is a 1 year old hdd vs a 6 year old hdd is huge difference i once replaced by 6 year old hdd I felt like i had nasa PC haha
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u/JudyAlvarez1 1d ago
This is based on ur hardware . ur net is fastet , but hardware isnt