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

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.

And yet somehow.

[Anonymous Coward]

I still won't go there or buy anything. Especially now...

Re:

[ozzymodus12]

You beat me to it. I remember what they did. I don't trust them.

Hmmm

[CEC-P]

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:

[keltor]

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.

No thank you sir, I don't like it.

[cephalien]

It starts faster...

What ELSE does it do?

Nobody knows.

They 'vibe' coded it.

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

Nope

[BitterEpic]

Sorry, I would still prefer Steam.

The real question ...

[keltor]

Who closes Steam?

...and?

[Isarian]

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.

K...

[locater16]

I'm sure the FPS advantage will deliver me victory on my "opening an app" world tournament results that everyone will be watching.

Not impressive at all.

[devslash0]

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

Re:

[pla]

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.

Incomparable

[devslash0]

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.

Redundant software should take 0 time

[ffkom]

I remember the days when a game was just a piece of software you would start on its own, no "helper" or "launcher" required at all to do so, thus zero time wasted on such.

kernel security agreements?

[txsable]

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.

And only 10% of the features of Steam

[HalAtWork]

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