Comment by simoncion
3 hours ago
As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it.
Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.
That said, Steam has a rather absurd CDN.
> You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.
What I've observed is
* when Steam downloads are in progress, between four and nine logical CPUs worth of processing power on my 32-way Threadripper are being used and zero logical CPUs are running at 100%
* when EGS downloads are in progress, exactly one logical CPU on that Threadripper is pegged at 100%
It's true that you can do gigabit downloads without having a multithreaded downloader. [0] But it seems to be true that the two biggest PC-game-store clients absolutely cannot... for whatever reason. Given the prevalence of gaming machines that have CPUs with four or more logical CPUs, I expect it's not really worth the effort to make whatever Steam is doing single-threaded, or whatever single-threaded thing EGS is doing fast enough to saturate a 1gbit+ download.
[0] One widely-deployed example would be SSH/SCP.