Steam download speed

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The only way you’ll really be able to test this is if someone gets a pcie 5.0 system with faster M.2 drives and much better CPU’s.

I’ve just ran another test for the sake of it onto a faster m.2 drive i have, and only got marginally better results. I would imagine that everything from CPU, pcie lanes (usage etc), chipset, M.2 and network gear will impact this test.

If the speedtest shows the expected results, then you’re fine (as that is downloading / uploading data still).

One thing i will do is ask a friend of mine who lives in london and is on 3Gbps internet symetrical to give his steam a test (As he has the same CPU, networking equipment and M.2 as me) and see what he gets. But i reckon the issue here is bottleknecked equipment or steam itself.

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Edit:

Found a reddit post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/10nhtsr/testing_the_limits_of_what_download_speeds_steam/

He managed to max out a 2.2Gbps connection on steam. So it’s nothing to do with steam and more to do with end user hardware.

Last edit, i promise.

M.2 drives have their marketed or advertised speeds. But i’ve NEVER seen a real world test hit these speeds. Even if you run CrystalDiskMark, you won’t get them speeds. So no point really relying on that, i’d pay more attention to cache etc as someone else explained.

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Too much of a pattern for it to be user hardware. There’s plenty of powerful rigs being posted here and all capping out at 1.5-1.6Gbps
That reddit post the user is running a 7770X

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I’ve come to the same conclusion in the past when trying to find where the bottleneck was, it’s like shooting arrows in the dark ouch! :slightly_smiling_face:

iSA to EISA to PCI to PCIE , it could be hardware good luck finding it :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

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Anyway, i’m not arsed. Someone tag me when they get above 1.6-1.7Gbps on Steam :sweat_smile:

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In theory, yeah maybe. I agree regarding a pattern.

But until either a pcie 5.0 based test is ran, or your replace your CPU, or Dziros shows a full task manager performance image showing his SSD usage, you won’t find out.

I’m happy to admit, either my CPU or my SSD (Or maybe even my mobo, i have had PCIe related issues with it) will be a bottleneck in this test.

That reddit post the user is running a 7770X

Which means he’s on PCIe 5.0. Almost like i mentioned that isn’t it… :joy: Faster CPU’s, faster PCIe gen, faster M.2 drives…

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Literally, there’s SO many different variables at play. You’d never figure it out

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Indeed, been there done that got the T-shirt :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

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What size is the T-Shirt? Can i have one?

I’ll be honest when you get to these higher speeds, it’s pointless chasing numbers so i’ve never done it. Too many variables, you won’t ever be happy

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I have started something here. Bet the Yayzi team a cursing me now😂

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Its a constructive discussion, and helps people make informed choices, i’d personally hold off throwing cash at a new cpu for the sole reason to max out your bandwidth on steam (but entirely up to you), atleast until someone posts it can be achieved on Steam, Yayzi and what hardware it’s been ran on.

If everything is configured correctly an i7 13700K which has pcie5 and 4 lanes with a pcie 4 nvme that is achieving almost pcie 5 speeds it should absolutely be able to get to 2Gbps and over even at a short burst.

It could be the steam CDN servers in London and Manchester capping or it could be user hardware but theres definitely a pattern limiting to 1.6Gbps. Jury is still out.

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Its a constructive discussion, and helps people make informed choices, i’d personally hold off throwing cash at a new cpu for the sole reason to max out your bandwidth on steam (but entirely up to you), atleast until someone posts it can be achieved on Steam, Yayzi and what hardware it’s been ran on.

THIS! AMEN TO THIS.

It could be the steam CDN servers in London and Manchester capping or it could be user hardware but theres definitely a pattern limiting to 1.6Gbps. Jury is still out.

Yep, 100%. I’ve worked in I.T for over 10 years and i’ve learnt sometimes the hard way, that nothing is a sure thing and sometimes things don’t work as they should.

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A mere baby in IT then ,:slightly_smiling_face:

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Imho Steam servers are capping the speed. On my previous task manager screenshot it shows around 29% of the HDD usage. This time in peak I had 1.8Gbps (but it wasn’t stable as you can see on the graph).

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Speetest is able to reach higher speeds because it runs a test across multiple servers. On a single server it also struggles. My conclusion would be that Yayzi is fine with the 2.3Gbps speed, but the other parties where you download anything from might become a bottleneck.
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To be fair, my Speedtests are generally around 1.6-1.7Gb so a possible Steam cap is inconclusive for me.

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TLDR: You can only ever go as fast as Steam will let you, then as fast as the weakest link in the chain, which synthetic benchmarks aren’t always right about.

The issue here from having done some multi-gig testing on boxes with 10Gb WAN is the steam ‘end’ of things is carefully managed to provide a reasonable experience to all rather than the maximum experience to everyone. For example using news, I can rip through a download queue at my full profile speed 24/7 if I had the need and storage space on Yayzi, that’s downloading, unpacking, processing and pushing to a different storage server @ 8Gbit ish, all while also downloading and unpacking the next articles etc.

In steam’s case you’re pulling data as fast as it will let you, writing it, reading it and then unpacking it to write again, then checking it, all while still pulling the next piece and unpacking that. I’ve not looked at if it’s making extensive use of RAM for cache before writing, either way, it’s not a straight ‘benchmark number says x’ calculation. Also as pointed out NVMe tends to employ dynamic cache whereby TLC/QLC drives will dynamically allocate ‘upto’ xxxGB as SLC for fast writes, once this SLC buffer is full, it grinds as it’s got to write direct to the TLC/QLC which is slower and in the case of QLC, often painfully slow. The dynamic part is based on the % full a drive is and the buffer gets smaller the higher that % is, it’s then cleared in the background. For general desktop use that works, for dumping 80GB+ to a small drive that’s 50% full, that’s a hard no, especially it that’s written, read, processed and written again as above.

If we ignore Steam for a moment, I have the same issue writing above 8Gb/s between local servers, the links are good to 10Gb either way, synthetic benchmarks are high 9’s, lots of NVMe/RAM on either end, but between the protocol and FS overhead and the amount of CPU required to drive the data at 10Gb, i’d need to upgrade both ends significantly and still wouldn’t see much of an improvement, after that it’s protocol tuning or finding network cards with better hardware offload OS support, that then leaves the FS layer, which can be the biggest issue, it’s a rabbit hole I don’t feel the need to go down for the sake of a few minutes a day, especially when in my case WAN is ‘only’ 1.2Gb/s

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Imho Steam servers are capping the speed.

They can’t be. Plenty of posts on reddit of people in the UK getting much faster speeds.

My buddy in London gets over 2.3Gbps. Though he is on 3Gbps internet.

Speetest is able to reach higher speeds because it runs a test across multiple servers. On a single server it also struggles.

This however is interesting, i find the opposite. If i let it choose multiple servers automatically, i get nowhere near the speeds i should do.

If i manually pick a single server, it’s fine.

I wonder if it’s peering related maybe?

Also to point out, Task Manager shows your ethernt at 2.3Gbps. Your steam shows disk usage at 2.2Gbps. I wonder if there is an element of maybe steam being inaccurate at showing download speeds etc? Even your task manager shows 244MB/s which is about 2.2Gbps.

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This ^^^^

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I might be wrong, but I think steam during the download process not only downloads the files but is also decompressing them and installing in some stages. That’s why I wouldn’t focus on the hard drive usage as a measure of speed (but only to see if it’s a potential bottleneck).