Steam downloads faster than my internet?

[Gravitygrim]

I'm not complaining about a slow speed. Far from it actually. I'm just curious, cause I have 100 mpbs down, but steam gives me 125 mbps down. Nothing else has ever done this, and I simply want to know how it's possible. Could the be a high speed compression server running for the best download speeds, or is steam just magic?

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

My service plan is 100Mbps, but SpeedTest claims 110 or so abouts.

 

So you may be getting faster speeds than advertised out of some fluke.

[Gravitygrim]

The thing is, I get 60-100 on speed tests. Those are tested on Ookla, and google. I've never seen a single thing, not even a really popular torrent, go as fast as steam. Though, I see my ISP giving extra bandwidth as a possibility, it would just be a really boring answer, so I'm digging for something else.

 

(oof, what a run on sentance

)

[LogicalDrm]

It's just way its calculated and displayed. Steam uses different units than service providers.

[Gravitygrim]

I changed the unit to mega bits in the settings, so it should be the same thing. It used to be mega bytes, but I didn't like that.
 

[Gravitygrim]

The difference is only by 10-25 megabits. It might be an incorrect reading, but I find that unlikely.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Honestly I wouldn't question it. If I'm getting something faster than the advertised speed, I'd just nod and smile.

[GDRRiley]

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Honestly I wouldn't question it. If I'm getting something faster than the advertised speed, I'd just nod and smile.

same pay for 100/100 get 125/125

just don't tell them.

[Enderman]

Change your speedtest server to a different location, usually one closer to you helps.

[DELTAprime]

Sometimes I get download speed readings on various platforms that say I'm getting 30 to 40 mbps which is impossible because the ADSL technology tops out at around 20 and I only get 10 to 12 at my place. Just incorrect readings.

[mariushm]

Steam transfers files using compression. What it shows on screen is the amount of bytes decompressed in a second.

 

A lot of game files can be compressed a bit (background music sometimes is uncompressed, some games also store everything but textures and music as uncompressed to stream it in game more easily etc).

 

So for example a game file is 5 GB and Steam manages to compress it on-the-fly down during transfer to 4 GB, your Steam client only downloads 4GB... so at 100 mbps, your  5 GB would be transferred in 5000 MB / 12.5 MB/s = 400 seconds but as you're only transferring just 4000 MB at 12.5 MB/s you'll complete the download in 320 seconds, so Steam will show that on average it has transferred  5000 MB / 320 seconds =  15.65 MB/s , which is higher than what your internet speed is.

 

Hope I explained it well.

 

Also sometimes Steam will only download what's changed, so for example if a game has 1000 files and there's an update for that game which "patches/updates" only 100 files, Steam simply does a hash check on your existing files and skips downloading files that weren't changed.

 

I'm not sure but I think it may include the file size of those files that were skipped in the  size transferred within a second.

 

So for example if you have a 50 MB file and then a 100 MB file and your 50 MB file was not changed, when Steam skips first file and starts downloading the second file you may see on screen network speed 50 MB/s because it thinks it transferred those 50 MB of the first file but in reality it never happened, it just skipped downloading that.

 

 

[Gravitygrim]

That's exactly what I was hoping it was.That's so cool, thank you for the answer.