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[Poll] Do you keep Steam running in the background all the time? (strawpoll.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.ml
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On machines where you start Steam manually in order to play a game, do you keep Steam running in the background after play session is over? Meaning if you no longer play any game for the moment, and just keep it running to be ready. Or do you close Steam, after the play session?

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[–] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

why would I want it slowing down

It doesn't. It did when I was using a 10 year old non-gaming laptop, yeah. On my main PC it's not noticeable at all.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    I’m not downvoting anyone here, but I will say just because you don’t notice, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect.

    I have a 7800X3D, 3090, 128GB RAM, NVMe SSD, all tuned and running on a “stripped down” Windows install, and I used some benchmarking scripts for Stellaris and Modded Minecraft that I already used for other stuff. Background churn absolutely affected frame time consistency (hitching) and simulation speed.

    I imagine it would be even more dramatic for a game that saturates the whole CPU, like Cyberpunk 2077 or something, though I have not tested that empirically. And this testing was on Windows; certain schedulers on Linux (like CachyOS offers) might handle background churn better, though there will always be a tradeoff.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Frame times are notoriously fickle. All it takes are two tasks that are intensive for 1/60th of a second to be run at once to get a spike. The key is how noticeable are the spikes?

    Most of the things you removed to strip down windows probably have much more of an impact than steam, and the 500mb of ram it uses does.

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