3.23 Steam installation causes significant performance issues, crashing, on low end storage

Hi!

I just wanted to report that the Steam installation, due to the way it differs from the standalone installation, causes a significant disk i/o bottleneck for players with older PCs or that have lower end storage controllers or storage media.

This is because (I suspect, looking at system storage i/o metrics) in the standalone installation, the game's assets and client data as well as packed shadercaches are in a single file (content.ggpk) where the Steam installation is spread across hundreds of files in dozens of sub directory paths. The content.ggpk is able to take advantage of os vfs features like memory mapping and sequential reads (vs random reads) to speed up file access latency as well as does not suffer from local file system cache misses when traversing hundreds of files in dozens of sub-directories.

Because of this major difference, I know at least 2 people (my son being one of them) who were unable to play the game without freezes and crashes (and subsequent deaths) when encountering mobs. When switching to the standalone client, disk i/o bottlenecks (which contribute to CPU bottlenecks) were significantly reduced and they were able to play the game.

I suspect the Steam client architecture, with the content.ggpk files expanded, is to handle smaller patches when needed on Steam -- but this is certainly causing an awful experience (literally unplayable) for some non-zero number of players.

Note: I have been using the standalone client on my own PC for a number of years and do not suffer from this level of client woe. I installed the Steam version and played with a new account under that for a bit, and it did not exhibit crashing or freezing after playing for a few minutes; but I have a decent modern cpu/gpu with NVMe storage.

Additional Note: I do suffer from longer than pre-3.23 load times into zones. Typically my zone transfer time was 1 second or less and now it often reaches 3-4 seconds so a massive reduction in performance, even with a beefy system. I recently reset my shader cache and recreated it so if it doesn't get better by today I'll file a new bug report with details about that specific 3.23 performance drop.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

Edit:

To highlight the file architecture differences

Standalone
- 2 sub-folders
- ~28 files
- 40GB space, with content.ggpk a 39GB file
- 0.019 seconds (un-cached) to traverse and determine total size of all files


Steam
- 3,204 sub-folders
- 40,193 files
- 38GB space
- 2 minutes and 11.117 seconds (un-cached) to traverse and determine total size of all files

Thank you so much, literally saved my league. I've been having problems almost every other league with performance and it's probably due to what you explained on this post. To anyone trying this out, first few maps and mechanics will be laggy, but after everything loads the game should run better

Hey switched from steam to standalone and game is performing a lot better for me - still not ideal but now it's in a playable state. Thanks!