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Epic Games' New Vibe-Coded Launcher Is 46% Faster Than Steam (neowin.net) 120

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-improved dept.
Epic has launched a preview of a new AI-generated Games Launcher that it says cold-starts 46% faster than Steam. Neowin reports: Epic commissioned a third-party company to benchmark this new launcher in its current Preview build versus the Steam client on Windows machines. The results reported that Epic's client is 46% faster than Valve's client during cold starts, clocking in at 5.47 seconds compared to Steam taking 10.07 seconds. When you restore both apps from system tray background states, the new client takes 0.36 seconds while Steam takes 0.42 seconds, according to the report. Speed aside, Epic says the new launcher gets a better interface, dedicated title summary pages, and custom top bars. "The updated client also lets players aggregate external PC game libraries, toggle between grid or list views, and monitor storage write rates alongside download queues," reports Neowin.

Epic Games says Fortnite will finally come to Linux through this new client once Easy Anti-Cheat is rebuilt and kernel-level security agreements are established with major Linux distros.
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Epic Games' New Vibe-Coded Launcher Is 46% Faster Than Steam More

Epic Games' New Vibe-Coded Launcher Is 46% Faster Than Steam

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  • And yet somehow. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:03PM (#66376178)
    I still won't go there or buy anything. Especially now...
    • You beat me to it. I remember what they did. I don't trust them.

    • Yeah it being vibe coded actually makes it worse that it even was before!

      • I doubt that. It was fucking abysmal before.
        Slop is slop, but I suspect the slop is much better than the pile of shit they called a launcher previously.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Moryath ( 553296 )
        "We made it faster, and we let the AI load it with Chinese spyware!"
        • Isn't this record getting old.

          Stop at Spyware. Adding Chinese to it just makes you sound like you like US, Russian, Korean, Israeli... Spyware better.

          Haha... In Epic's case, maybe your racist nonsense flipped on you.

          Before, Epic installed low quality Spyware that hogged system resources and won't let you be spied on without waiting for slow massive updates to their Spyware. But now there is high quality Chinese Spyware and my PC is so much faster now!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      Yeah, the Epic games launcher has always taken literal minutes to launch, part of the reason I refused to use it in the first place.

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CEC-P ( 10248912 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:11PM (#66376194)
    But the "developers," and I use that term very loosely, don't know what the code does or why it does it. And they want me to run it? No thanks. Also, way too many creeps working in upper management at that company.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      I mean I'm happy to hate on them, but these are pro devs using AI, they are sanitizing the code.

      Also if they are using frontier models from Anthropic (which they are), the models don't really do nonsense code now.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Xenx ( 2211586 )

        I mean I'm happy to hate on them, but these are pro devs using AI, they are sanitizing the code.

        I don't know if I would vouch for there capabilities or not. That said, if they aren't good devs the quality of their own code would be circumspect as well.

      • the models don't really do nonsense code now.

        Yes, they do.
        If you think otherwise, it's because you have trained yourself to stop seeing it.

        I'm currently reviewing my CEO's vibe-coded slop courtesy of Claude as we speak.
        Don't get me wrong- it's cool. I like what he built. But fuck me is the code bad.

        • Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

          by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:16AM (#66376782)

          I'm currently reviewing my CEO's vibe-coded slop courtesy of Claude as we speak.
          Don't get me wrong- it's cool. I like what he built. But fuck me is the code bad.

          Went through this recently with our CEOs new vibe coded "financial agent" ...thing.... It was a neat enough, although highly ceo-brained kind of app. But holy fuck was the code bad.

          It took me all of 2 minutes to locate an exploit where you could get full access to any other customers bank account. I paid myself $10 finder fee with his bank account to show him that shit shit actually matters.

          In the end I was too annoyed to progress further so handed it to one of the juniors to audit the rest and yeah, he found endless bugs and vunerabilities in it too.

          This was all done with claudes highest end model too. I was honestly surprised it was as big a mess as it was.

          • Yup. Metrics of slop aren't highly improved between things like Astra and Fable 5 vs. significantly older models.
            They all continue to produce ass-tons of vulnerabilities and code erosion the more they touch the code.

            I have determined that everyone who tells you that "you're holding it wrong" (here's *my* secret method to make it not suck) simply can't see the problems. This might be due to incompetence, or it might be due to willful blindness. Or in some cases, it might even be a survival mechanism.

            Eit

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          The problem with AI generated code, whether it is Claude or not, is a person vibe coding it. If they're ignorant of coding and just prompting AI until it does what they want then the code underneath is 100% guaranteed to be unreadable garbage and probably very brittle, unpredictable, insecure and unmaintainable outside of what it appears to do.

          Conversely if it is driven by somebody technically proficient where code is generated, reviewed and adequately tested to specific requirements and standards, then t

          • I think you've just drank the kool-aid. I don't mean that as an insult. I think probably a large portion of us have. Or maybe, have been beaten into submission... hard to say, really.

            Ultimately, there are benchmarks for antipatterns and code erosion, and other things we'd call "slop".
            There isn't a reliable way to get the models to quit doing very very poorly at those benchmarks. That's just a fact.
            If you think you've got the magic sauce, you should head over to SlopCodeBench and submit some patches.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by DrXym ( 126579 )
              I'm a realist and I haven't "drunk the kool aid" I can see the absolute shit AI can produce and its limitations. It needs supervision and knowledge and it needs to be used in small, iterative, reviewable steps on tasks it is trained and capable of doing.
              • Those who have drank the kool-aid seldom realize they have drunk the kool-aid.
                The hint that you have is that you think you've found the right way to hold it, and refuse to accept that even if you hold it as such- it simply produces code of high cyclomatic complexity, opacity, and flat out bad ways of doing things- that is, you deny that the benchmarks apply to.... you. You are special.

        • So I have a theory about that.

          I think we accept slop because software development has turned to shit in the last 20 years. The obsession with multilayered "frameworks". The fact devs specialize in those frameworks to the point you can't get hired without 5 years experience of, say, React (by comparison I was hired for a FORTRAN job on the basis of my C skills in 1995. WTF is going on? Don't blame HR, because HR does't know React from a hole in the ground, it's the devs who are asking for an experienced Reac

          • I do broadly agree with you.
            Particularly if we further refine it to something like "trendslop".

            Programmers have been doing trendy piss-poor engineering for a long fucking time, now.
            XML as a data interchange format still blows my fucking mind.
            It's like someone said, "well, hardware is cheap- so we don't really need to worry about moving data efficiently... In fact, let's see if we can burn down as many trees possible while doing it."

            At least JSON can be somewhat serialized into a real machine structur

      • I am sure you are right and the code is looked at the same way any human-written code would be (including checking it with AI and human reviews).

        But at the end of the day, Gaben could walk off of one of his yachts and say "the extra load time is because Steam has to load a friends list that isn't empty" and everyone would be giddy at the own. No one gives a fuck about Steam load times and you'll save way more time by just never installing Epic Games Store. The only reason to touch that is Fortnite, and it

    • Honestly if it was AI generated I trust it more than anything else an Epic "developer" has produced.

  • No thank you sir, I don't like it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cephalien ( 529516 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:15PM (#66376208)

    It starts faster...

    What ELSE does it do?

    Nobody knows.

    They 'vibe' coded it.

    How long until it 'vibe' steals your credit card info?

    • If you release code, it's on you to know what's in it and what it does, doesn't matter who (or in this case: what) wrote it, contributed, etc.

      I think the scenario you're describing is more likely to occur with some rogue library you've imported than it would with an LLM, specifically because it's unlikely that you've read all of the code in every library you've ever imported.

      • Fascinating.

        However, you're missing the point the user, the poor bastard who uses the code and will have their credit card stolen, did NOT write/vibe code the thing.

        Saying "Oh it's the programmer's responsibility" is adding nothing to the discussion. We know it's the programmer's "responsibility". Likewise it's the programmer's responsibility to not have buffer overflows in their code, but they still program that shit, which is why things like Rust, Go, and even Java and C#, are good things and why increasi

    • You're assuming an Epic developer is any better or more trustworthy. I mean these are the people who took 3 years to figure out how to add a shopping cart to a store front which itself is nothing more than a webpage and electron. I think that's a programming 101 homework assignment for anyone educated.

  • Nope (Score:4, Informative)

    by BitterEpic ( 10503015 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:17PM (#66376216) Homepage
    Sorry, I would still prefer Steam.

  • The real question ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by keltor ( 99721 ) * on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:19PM (#66376226)
    Who closes Steam?

    • This is Epic games we're talking about. Their launcher was such a resource hog they probably naturally assumed that everyone closed launchers after playing games in the hope that their computer won't crash due to out of memory errors and bearing failure on the cooling fans.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Moryath ( 553296 )
        EGS is so shittily coded that it refuses to use anything but your discrete GPU on a laptop that has one. So you HAVE to force-close it if you don't want your laptop to fail to sleep properly.
    • To be fair, I do have to restart my PC once every five or six months...

    • Well, I am a little bit old school.
      I am still using ice.

  • The Steam launcher runs for me, and I suspect most of us, silently in the background. Their business practices still suck, and even then 5 seconds on a cold start is not worth supporting that shit.

    • We're not the market. The market is people who brag about overclocking their PCs by immersing them in mineral oil for a youtube video.

  • K... (Score:5, Funny)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:27PM (#66376244)
    I'm sure the FPS advantage will deliver me victory on my "opening an app" world tournament results that everyone will be watching.

  • Steam client is so slow and bloated that being only 46% faster is laughable and not an achievement at all.

    • Re:Not impressive at all. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:55PM (#66376274) Journal
      I'm not trying to be an apologist for Steam here, but am I missing a key detail in this story? We're talking about the launcher here, nothing to do with the content itself.

      "Cold start to store" is a metric that I literally couldn't give a subjective opinion on, because once Windows starts, Steam is just there and ready to go. And "to store"? Seriously? Give us "Tray icon to loading a game" and we can have a discussion. "Thing that doesn't happen to thing that only happens rarely", not so much.
      • Ya, same- not trying to engage in apologetics for the monopoly in the room, but seriously Epic- Physician, heal thyself.
        Steam is whatever. It runs, and it gives me no problems. That's not a tacit approval of the problems with the ecosystem of digitally delivered software and platforms in genearl, but Steam gives me no problems in that otherwise shittastic arena.
        Now Epic? Their store is the *only* store I have ever uninstalled, because it was such a gigantic pile of shit. The rest mind their own business d
      • To me the metric is saying the same thing as "We heard all the complaints with our old turd. As a result, our new turd is shinier."

    • Exactly. The real story is that an-app that manages "a few dozen games" takes *seconds* to load on modern hardware. Seriously---the computer can do billions of operations per second per core, has at least a dozen cores, gigabytes of ram, SSDs that can pull at least a gig of data in a second... ...and it takes them *seconds* to load?

      Why isn't this instantaneous, or rather, faster than a blink of an eye? It should take longer to lift the finger from clicking the mouse than for this "manager of a dozen games"

    • While I've never considered Steam slow before the dickwaving contest started it's worth noting that literally before you made this comment (October 15) Valve pushed an updated (October 13) that more than halved Steam's loading time just to give Epic the middle finger. It's probably making your point that Steam wasn't well optimised but the reality is no one cared. I mean, what do you do with all those 5 seconds you save?

  • You can't compare these two. Years of bloat and neglect vs a daisy-fresh beta MVP. Let me know when you actually add anything useful to the client, Epic.

  • kernel security agreements? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by txsable ( 169665 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:54PM (#66376272) Homepage

    I'm more concerned about this part...

    "...once Easy Anti-Cheat is rebuilt and kernel-level security agreements are established with major Linux distros."

    I really hope the major distros tell them to go pound sand. If Epic wants to release an EAC kernel module, that's one thing, but the distros should not be a party to that fiasco.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      I am not inherently against kernel-level anti-cheat in Linux. I think it's better for those users to be able to switch to Linux, for them and for adoption. I don't want it myself, but to each their own. Just as long as if/when those agreements happen, they don't just slap them into the default. It needs to be a separate distro, or a proper opt-in process.
    • Cheating is a business. A pretty large one. People will pay entirely too much money for the ability to cheat in online games. Streamers and want to be YouTubers especially because viewers expect them to be able to carry on a conversation and parasocial bullshit while playing at top level

      So you need ridiculously complex and sophisticated and unbreakable anti cheat to make online games playable with anyone but a small group of friends. And it isn't really practical to build a online game Community around

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by strech ( 167037 )

      They posted in more detail about that elsewhere; no anti-cheat kernel module [epicgames.com]:

      Does EAC Linux v2 use a kernel driver?

      No. EAC Linux v2 does not install or load an anti-cheat kernel module. It uses security features already provided by the Linux kernel, together with an anti-cheat systemd service and eBPF programs.

      Does EAC Linux v2 run in the background all the time?

      No. It includes a systemd service, but the service only starts when a protected game starts and it stops when the game exits.

      By the sounds of it, b

  • This is progress but they have a long way to go and many more metrics to measure up to.

  • 404 media had been showing how weird the glitches are. Good job. And like everyone already said, who even cares how fast it starts. Are we even talking about feature parity? Does it have a smaller memory footprint? Does it tax the system less when games are running?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      404 media had been showing how weird the glitches are. Good job. And like everyone already said, who even cares how fast it starts. Are we even talking about feature parity? Does it have a smaller memory footprint? Does it tax the system less when games are running?

      But is it glitchy enough to be useful? I mean, how long until we can use this launcher to get free games? That's what people really want to know - how long until a glitch makes everything in the store is free so you can buy every game for $0?

      Or f

      • Is it worth it anyway? The purpose of Epic Store is to check what games they're giving away every Thursday, collect your copy and never bother to play it. Your don't even need a client for this.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Is it worth it anyway? The purpose of Epic Store is to check what games they're giving away every Thursday, collect your copy and never bother to play it. Your don't even need a client for this.

          Well, if you can save $100 off a game, why not? If you can get the new Epic Games Store launcher to give you GTA 6 for free, rather than paying what, $100 for it off Steam, wouldn't you use the EGS version?

          By the same measure, if you can get Vbucks for free it would be well worth it for people as well.

          • If you mean a free copy via a bug, it's just piracy with extra steps. If you mean a legitimate free copy, sure, that'd be nice. But during the several years of Epic giving away stuff every week, I've only got one one game that I wanted to play, but didn't already have. I later purchased and played it on Steam with a 85% discount because actually installing a whole separate client felt like a hassle.

  • This feels like some kind of weird joke (Score:3)

    by thecombatwombat ( 571826 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:16PM (#66376306)

    Fortnite coming to Linux is actually wild news. That's a huge, industry moving event even if virtually no one on /. plays Fortnite. That's the headline.

    I mean, in 2026, for any kind of application, but especially a launcher of other applications, starting up in 5 seconds is absurdly slow.

    The fact that Steam somehow still takes 10 in 2026, just isn't much of a flex for Epic.

    I am still just stunned Steam takes that long. It should show its UI and your library virtually immediately, and fill in the stuff that requires a login second. It's just crazy. It's not 2005 anymore. Nothing else I've used in easily a decade still works like Steam.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      It's not like it uses much CPU during that startup. It's checking things, looking for game updates, that sort thing. I have a KDE window rule setup on "steamwebhelper" to prevent focus stealing so then it doesn't interfere with what else I'm doing at the same time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

      Fortnite coming to Linux is actually wild news. That's a huge, industry moving event

      Not really. It's a shitty game.

      • It's still one of the biggest games out there besides Roblox. Porting it to Linux opens up a lot of present and future Linux-based gaming PCs/handhelds.

        • This. Yeah, obviously the /. crowd doesn't like Fortnite, I've never played it. But for years, my nephew basically lived inside it, right now, the middle of a Wednesday morning in the US, at least a solid million people are playing Fortnite.

          It's definitely news.

          The bigger news since I read a bit more about it, is they are straight up porting Easy Anti-Cheat to Linux, a huge number of the remaining games that don't play on Linux, will probably start coming over in the next twelve months. That is crazy news i

          • Nope. EAC is already on Linux. You don't seem to need Linux gaming news since you don't seem to follow it now.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

            EAC already works on Linux, some game developers just block Linux regardless. Mostly shitty F2P "competitive" games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, Destiny 2...and more. Those games work just fine on Linux, but the developers purposely crippled their product so Linux user couldn't actually play. If it's F2P, it's shit.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

          I don't care how many retards are playing with feces, it's still feces.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kick6 ( 1081615 )

      I am still just stunned Steam takes that long. It should show its UI and your library virtually immediately, and fill in the stuff that requires a login second. It's just crazy. It's not 2005 anymore. Nothing else I've used in easily a decade still works like Steam.

      I've never once cared. It starts to the system tray.

    • Linux-user for... I lost count now, but I'm not sure what you're talking about. I use Steam daily-ish and don't experience a 10 second load time. Are they testing these on toasters or something? Did *you* actually test it before regurgitating TFS? I don't play Fortnite, but unless there was some kernel-level anti-cheat a-la Riot Games-style (rip LoL and Valorant I guess), you can play pretty much anything on Linux. All my Blizzard games work fine, I have some EA games that force me through their portal, sti

  • 5 seconds for a relatively simple app to load? That's nothing to be proud of. Both Epic and Steam should be ashamed that their apps take so long to load. They can do a lot better, and hopefully this focus on performance will lead to both apps getting their load times down to 1 second or less and spark an industry trend towards reducing application bloat, optimising load and reducing memory footprint (especially with RAM being so expensive). This bloat trend is a blight on the whole industry.

    • It's nothing "shame" about it. Most people just don't care. A perfect example of this is that in response to Tim waving his tiny cock about loading speeds Valve pushed out an update in literally under a day and no Steam loads faster than Epic does. No one gives a fuck about these 5 seconds.

  • It won't take long and the new client is just as bloated as the old one.

    • It won't take long and the new client is just as bloated as the old one.

      Actually it's already beaten it. Their previous client started life as an electron app. It literally couldn't get any worse than what they had. Vibe coding is a significant improvement.

  • When you give it zero features. Oh look DOS boots faster than Windows! Whoope de fucking do. Timmy you've already replaced your previous product without delivering any of the features you promised.

    But that said on the up side, given the coding quality of Epic games, e.g. their attempt to roll out cloud sync of saved which nuked everyone's progress, their inability to deliver games without relying on steam.ini for compatibility APIs, Vibecoding literally couldn't do a worse job than those brainless morons.

  • 46% faster wile having none of steams features.

    • Actually 4.4% slower. Valve rolled out a steam update in literally under a day and now Steam loads 0.2seconds faster than Epic's launcher, and you get to keep all of Steam's features.

  • stop calling it that. (Score:5, Informative)

    by redback ( 15527 ) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @09:11PM (#66376610)

    vibe coding is now cuck coding. because you just sit in a chair and watch.

  • ... astonishingly clunky on my machine too. Don't think you need vibe coding to fix that though. Perhaps a senior or two who are better at setting the right priorities for the software.

  • I'm still using Steam. Gabe hasn't done anything to abuse my trust.

  • The bloat will pile up and they will be right there nice and even with Steam :D

  • It takes about 5 minutes after the initial boot up on my work laptop for Teams to even show its face, let alone be functional. Cmon Microsoft, just tell Astra to "make this software load faster" already.

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