This is a reinstall
I just got fiber (100% luck), but I have never, ever, seen a website able to hit 100% download speed.
Does GOG cache my downloads or is it just that good?

With the GoG downloader? No.

With Galaxy? Not sure, don't think so. It's possible they could download it in the background, but people with download limits would have issues if they were downloading and using their limited space without permission with the 'expectation' they would want to download it later so they are doing it beforehand...

Sounds like what Microsoft was doing with Windows10, pre-downloading it so it was 'ready' when you were okay with 'upgrading'...

Now it is possible that some things obviously don't need to be downloaded which could be cached, like the shared libraries and dependencies only need to be downloaded once. I've seen at least one game where it was 300MB and 100MB was dependencies (mostly DirectX), so dropping 100MB would make it faster (or knowing it doesn't need it, it simply ignores it).


HOWEVER: if you already have the installer downloaded, it merely does a check to see if the files are courrupt and if so re-download those portions. If you already had the entire game downloaded, then it would be near instant for 'download complete'. (At least with GoG Downloader)

To me it looks like a verification of files already on disk, as the reported speed is close to the read speed of a standard hard drive.

A quick look up and yes, fibre can reach those speeds and more too as long as your computer, especially the hard drive, is fast enough. I would have to pay double what I pay now to get that speed though.

Downlading directly to a SSD.

It maybe just certain games..
I just tried reinstalling HoMM3 & NWN - they capped at 15MB/s, avg ~8

Steam caps out around 55 MB/s, avg ~40

Origin, never seen it break 10 MB/s, avg ~4 - but once you pass the 5GB mark, they match Steam speeds. Game patches take forever, the smaller ones can go under 1MB/s, but once you pause/unpause - I guess to demand priority - you get Steam speeds. (Origin = EA)

Ubiplay, never used it

Still no clue why the Gothic series I just bought is 11x faster than my older GOG games.

Would be nice if GOG told us at what maximum speed they serve us files. My connection, while not slow, is not fast enough to find the limits of good services like GOG.

We dropped TV and bought a Roku. Huge change but it's cheaper than paying cable. Agreed. Cause what if you do get fiber, you want whicever service you put the most money into be able to keep up to your new speeds.

that's a nice download speed ! Regarding the "cache" - to my knowledge no

they might not even know, since they don't serve the files. They use a CDN provider (Edgecast) to distribute the game data. The nature of a CDN means there is a chance that you will connect & download from totally different servers each time. Which explains some difference in speed that can happen.

Not sure if it explains the rather huge difference that OP saw ...
maybe it's just a measurement bug in Galaxy :p

Does the pope shit in the woods?

he does
and I said holy shit when I saw the Gothic 2 speed lol

I have a faster connection and I'm always topping out. GOG doesn't throttle anything apparently.