Steam Client Beta for October 16 brings another round of startup performance

17 Oct 2026 at 7:19 am UTC | Last updated: 17 Oct 2026 at 7:22 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

I do love a bit of competition between stores don't you? Valve's latest Steam Client Beta for October 16th brings more speed.

Recently, we had the initial Epic Games Launcher Preview with Linux support, with Epic talking up how it started faster than Steam. Then a Steam update happened, and Steam got faster - well it's now even faster again.

All the changes listed by Valve are below.

Steam Client Beta - October 16th

General

• Second round of Steam startup performance improvements following shipping of prior improvements in public client.
• Fixed some cases the Steam Service Error dialog was showing incorrectly if you quit/restarted Steam quickly.
• Fixed another error displaying dates for our friends in British Columbia.
• Fixed Steam Frame native-only content showing as installable on Windows.
• Fixed the layout of the volume slider in the voice chat context menu.
• Output volume settings for friends in voice chat will now persist between Steam sessions rather than resetting on restart.

Linux

• Fixed Vulkan games hanging after alt-tab.
• Fixed a bug that caused some native non-steam games to fail to launch.

Steam Input

• Fixed NCAA Football 27 not getting the game configuration applied at game startup.

We all win when there's more competition. Love to see it.

Testing the Beta myself, Steam really does load up ridiculously fast now. I have a big Steam Library too, so it's quite impressive compared to even a month ago.

🌐 External Sources: steamcommunity.com Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Beta, Misc, Steam, Valve 19 Likes All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.