Epic Games Previews AI-Generated Launcher It Says Cold-Starts 46% Faster Than Steam
Epic Games is previewing an AI-generated game launcher that a benchmark it commissioned found cold-starts 46% faster than Steam on Windows.
Epic commissioned a third-party company to benchmark the Preview build of the launcher against Valve's Steam client on Windows. In that test, the Epic client reached a cold start in 5.47 seconds, while Steam took 10.07 seconds, according to the Neowin report. When both applications were restored from a system-tray background state, the new Epic client took 0.36 seconds and Steam took 0.42 seconds. The comparison was paid for by Epic rather than produced by independent testing.
Beyond speed, Epic says the rebuilt launcher has an improved interface, dedicated summary pages for individual titles and custom top bars. Neowin reported that the client also lets players aggregate external PC game libraries, switch between grid and list views, and monitor storage write rates alongside download queues.
Epic says Fortnite will come to Linux through the new client once Easy Anti-Cheat has been rebuilt and kernel-level security agreements have been established with major Linux distributions. The company has not said when that work will be finished or when the launcher will leave its preview stage.