If someone could just ease my fears

I've heard the Steam version will generally be a bit slower than the disc version of the game? Any truth in this to any extent at all before I go and buy it off Steam instead of going to the shops.

I'm not sure of the logic behind that. I bought GTA IV from Steam and it's as fast as it was on the disk I'd previously owned.

Yeah about 10-20% slower iirc

Yeah about 10-20% slower iirc

I have never noticed any reduction in performance- that's just a rumour. Don't worry, you'll get the same performance, you won't notice any difference.

I'm not sure of the logic behind that. I bought GTA IV from Steam and it's as fast as it was on the disk I'd previously owned.

Would Steam being open not account for worse performance though?

I've heard the Steam version will generally be a bit slower than the disc version of the game? Any truth in this to any extent at all before I go and buy it off Steam instead of going to the shops.

why on earth would it be slower?

who makes up this kind of crap?

Yeah about 10-20% slower iirc

I've never experienced any problems :S

Would Steam being open not account for worse performance though?

Only if you were running windows 95, with about 256mb of RAM.

Only if you were running windows 95, with about 256mb of RAM.

What he said. Steam is a start up item for me, and according to my Task Manager it's using 5,408K of memory. In comparison Firefox is a whopping 190K, iTunes is 29K, etc.

Only if you were running windows 95, with about 256mb of RAM.

The ram it uses is negligible...I use steam quite a lot, been running empire totalwar since march this year, a power hungry game- steam uses about 11mb of ram something like that- it really is very small and you wouldn't notice any difference, using steam or from a disk.

Plus, I ran fm09 without steam even running since last year...if you're that concerned, you can create a shortcut from the .exe located in the data files, via steam on your pc. But, you dont need to that, to reduce performance issues, I just prefer to do that. Really don't worry, if its more convenient for you, or whatever reason you have and want to buy from steam, go a head.

Righto happy enough with that, cheers ears.

It will not be slower. This misconception stems from the notion that Steam would hog enough system resources to affect your gaming performance which is simply not true. It's an amateur's assumption based on general knowledge that all currently running applications share system resources, meaning that background processes compete with your game for them. A lack of ability to determine which processes use how much of which resource, and a lack of perspective in terms of how big an impact a certain consumption of a particular resource has on other processes, results in general fear of any process that does anything whatsoever while your game is running.

In short, Steam has such a small footprint that you would never notice a difference with it running or not; most performance benchmarks can't even do it.

Yeah about 10-20% slower iirc

The above person seems to be taking people for a ride.

Ive never noticed any performance drops from using steam.

Its just people bashing steam at anything they can think of.