Steam and performance.

[TosaInu]

Hello,

This may be something for the Apothecary, but it's closely related to actual gaming too.

I noticed a few days ago that my memory usage and CPU load were unusually high, near the level of exhausting. While I wasn't doing anything special. I have Half Life 2 installed, together with Steam. Steam loads into the tray. I pressed CTRL ALT DEL to check the Windows Task Manager and noticed that Steam was using a bit. Didn't explain the 100's of MB that were gone though. I terminated Steam and immediately CPU load returned from 60% to the normal 5% and over 200 MB of RAM was freed. Any program can have a bad hairday, so ok.

Today I'm benchmarking with aquamark and noticed that the reults differ a lot from yesterdays, both in GFX and CPU. The culprit is Steam again. The difference is over 500 points in graphic and over 1,200 in CPU. 43.1 FPS while Steam is running, 48 FPS when Steam is off. I'm not aware Steam is actively doing any good at those moments, it was just sitting there.

Turning Steam off while doing anything else than playing Half-Life2 is a very good idea.

[KukriKhan]

Noticed the exact same syndrome with Steam & HL2 (a new purchase for me). Its 'phone home for updates' attempts seem to gobble up resources and not return them to the OS when the 'call' is finished.

I keep it turned off when not actively playing HL2, also.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

I wonder if this is still true for steam in offline mode?

My computer upstairs has no internet so I had to borrow someones cable for a bit to get steam acquainted with itself and then use offline mode all the time. I personally hate steam because I do not have access to the internet on a decent computer....

[TosaInu]

Steam is using 10 MB at startup, seems huge to me for a tiny verification. It quickly grows though. I've seen 18, 40 and 45 MB. Insane.

I've not tried the offline mode yet. Does it still load into the tray then?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Yeah, if I wanted I could probably install on as many computers as I wanted using offline mode at the same time, I have not tried and I will not try. You can play games on LAN and single player as long as you have registered it once. Only redeeming part of steam is that it still allows me to play without internet.

[Red Harvest]

I saw a mag or something really trashing the Steam system recently but it didn't say what the problems were. I'm not an HL player so I don't know anything about it. I don't trust anything trying to autoupdate/verify itself.

[The Tuffen]

I've had issues with Steam and performance. I've had programs "give up" when Steam has been trying to log me in (I'm running a AMD 2500+ processor with a gig of PC3200 RAM).

I now don't have steam running unless I'm gonna play HL2 (something i havn't done in a while (will complete it one day)

[Uesugi Kenshin]

You should finish it, the ending is great and the Super Gravity Gun is awesome.

BTW I checked and Steam still uses 18mbs while in offline mode. I will be keeping it off for now.

[The Tuffen]

You should finish it, the ending is great and the Super Gravity Gun is awesome.

BTW I checked and Steam still uses 18mbs while in offline mode. I will be keeping it off for now.

Yeah i'll get round to finishing it soon. Just gonna complete KOTOR2 first (then i'll have to force myself off Joint operations)

[Uesugi Kenshin]

I have never played KOTOR 2, I got into Project: Ego, aka Fable. Great game.....


How big of a difference did Steam make in benchmark scores?

[Oaty]

So what is steam and what is it that it does for you?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

It is Valves proprietary game distribution and registration program. It was first implemented in Half Life 2. It requires you to install CS: Source, even if like me you hate CS. It makes you register the game online to start playing the single player game. It allows you to have your computer use a good deal of RAM and bandwith to constantly call Valve and ask if there are updates, I do not believe you can even set it for once daily or anything. Even in offline mode it uses 18mgbs of valuable RAM.

Did I miss any advantages? I do not know of many, but I am not hooked up to the mothership....

[Red Harvest]

It is Valves proprietary game distribution and registration program. It was first implemented in Half Life 2. It requires you to install CS: Source, even if like me you hate CS. It makes you register the game online to start playing the single player game. It allows you to have your computer use a good deal of RAM and bandwith to constantly call Valve and ask if there are updates, I do not believe you can even set it for once daily or anything. Even in offline mode it uses 18mgbs of valuable RAM.

Did I miss any advantages? I do not know of many, but I am not hooked up to the mothership....

And with that...Red Harvest scratches Half Life 2 off his list of games to ever consider mounting on his hard drive. Reminds me of Norton Anti-Virus...

[Gregoshi]

Computer Gaming World was less than complimentary about Steam. According to them, everyone and his mother bought HL2 on the day it came out, took it home, installed it and then had to wait hours (about 8 for the CGW chief editor) just to play the game as the servers were overloaded with everyone's Steam trying to register their copy. Me thinks someone hadn't thought the idea through completely.


I got Steam compliments of having downloaded and installed the HL2 demo. I can't say I'm thrilled about it - just more junkware to gunk up my PC.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Yeah, luckily or unluckily I had to wait a week or two so I could get my computer to someone's house where they have broadband. I missed the crowd.

It is annoying, it never seems to start up quickly when I want it to and when i don't want it to it does.....

[Crazed Rabbit]

It's like windows ME, but somehow less usefull.

I really wish valve had just kept the WON servers, which they wre using for MP before they built steam. The WON servers worked, and let me play. When I got steam, the CD keys from several half life games I had purchased were no good.

Oh, and steam has been hacked, with account name and password info posted on the net.

And the fact that you have to have it running to play HL2? And it's pig-like consumption of resources? Why, oh why did they make it?

Crazed Rabbit

[therother]

I read the title of this thread, and who posted it, and every so briefly thought to myself - "is there nothing TosaInu won't do to improve the performance of The Guild? A steam powered server? That's something I've got to see." Unfortunately lucidity eventually returned, as it has the very annoying habit of doing, and I realised it was just about Half-life 2!

[TosaInu]

BTW I checked and Steam still uses 18mbs while in offline mode. I will be keeping it off for now.

It starts at about 10 MB afaik. Sounds to me as if it's doing more than just passing another 'this is a legal customer go ahead' signal.

That it crawls up to 18 MB in offline mode suggests that it's leaking.

[KukriKhan]

I read the title of this thread, and who posted it, and every so briefly thought to myself - "is there nothing TosaInu won't do to improve the performance of The Guild? A steam powered server? That's something I've got to see." Unfortunately lucidity eventually returned, as it has the very annoying habit of doing, and I realised it was just about Half-life 2!

LoL. A steam-powered server was an upgrade from our former power source. Here's staff from a couple years ago, trying to eak out a few more bits of bandwidth for the Org:

I leave it to the reader to decide who is whom in the pic.

[Red Harvest]

Steam really sounds like a bad idea, that was then poorly implemented.

I used to play on WON back when they hosted Civil War Generals II. It actually worked very well. That is about the only MP experience I can speak of glowingly. We did a pretty good job of self-policing and they even offered me a moderating job with some pay, but I didn't want fun to become work.

I tried some online flight sim stuff (IL2, and some online Starcraft, etc.) The jerk to player ratio was too high for my tastes and the blatant cheating was annoying. Lag with flight sims was too high for a good experience, warping was a big problem.

[lars573]

As bad as most of you think steam is now, trust me it was worse. My brother got the public beta build in 2001. Now THAT didn't work at all. When ever we tried to start it up to play a game if it didn't lock up our system immediatly it was a miracle. Then it would lock up when we tried to search for servers. About a year and a half later when after steam had been released for a while the dwindling WON servers made me decide to try to make steam work. I got the 649k exe file and registered it. It works very for me, connections to online games are as good as they ever were with WON. Downside is that only official valve games (HL CS DOD) get autoupdated threw steam. I just checked my task manager and right this second steam is using 9 megs of ram. Which is about normal and it never impares my systems preformance. Now don't misconstrew the fact that I don't hate steam as me liking the way HL2 is set up. Cause I hate that you have to dump 5 gigs of data from 5 disks onto your HD then decrypt them to play HL2. Right now my steam folder takes up about 7 almost 8 gigs of HD space.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

It phisically cannot be online when in offline mode unless it is using some method of accessing the internet that I do not know of. It is not attached to a phone line and our house does not have cable. If it somehow managed to get itslef into the satelite and hijacked that then maybe it would be going somewhere, but it would then be getting into Skynet type power.

It is 18mgbs of RAM in offline mode for me. I have no idea why but it is.....


Oh and I think Tosa is the guy in the hat. I was not around so I have nobody else to guess, I am just assuming Tosa was in the picture.

[Productivity]

Steam really sounds like a bad idea, that was then poorly implemented.

The first half of it, the distribution system wasn't a bad idea really, although I fail to see what it brings that the conventional system doesn't (how hard is it to get to a shop, and you still need publishers to provide capital while you develop a game).

The second half as a piracy prevention measure was an utter failure. It was freely available if you knew where to look the day it was released, infact more so at times it appeared that it was allowing pirates to download through it the games. The only ever effective piracy protection will be a strong multiplayer side, with a cd key list.

Aside from this failure, it also annoys legitimate users, with it's checks and so on, and general flakiness. Also as an automatic update system I would be a bit worried, given the theft of the HL2 source code from Valve as to it's security.

Added to that, Valve's generally shady business practice re. ATI and Nvidia don't give me great confidence in them.