I have 8gb ram, a quad core processor, a decent video card, dsl and a pretty fast hard drive but the load times on this game are just horrible at times. Is there anyway to speed them up?

I have 8gb ram, a quad core processor, a decent video card, dsl and a pretty fast hard drive but the load times on this game are just horrible at times. Is there anyway to speed them up?

 

If a solid state drive ( SSD ) is used it is a pretty significant difference for loading times. Drive seems to be the main bottleneck for loading. I've seen the before / after results on my friends pc from changing this one component. The other stuff likely have diminishing value after a certain point.

Even with a really powerful PC this game Loads EVERYTHING on the Planet, so you dont need too Bother walking into a little building and waiting for it too load so the Action is Non-Stop. It could get annoying at times but if your planning too play 2 hours straight on the same planet there will be NO LOADING time for it.

If a solid state drive ( SSD ) is used it is a pretty significant difference for loading times.

 

Yes this is an issue here.

After moving my game from a mechanical disk to a SSD it decreased my loading time. I normally use about 10-15 sec to load from my ship to any planet.

 

And yes it way better than standing in the wilderness, waiting for mobs to load It's also great if you have slower computer. Or a mid computer ofc in your case

And tbh how often do you load? when leveling almost never.

in end game? well you load flashpoints, but they are small and loads fast.

Some people have used extra memory to set up RAM Disk. The thread also explains some of the mechaincs of why load times are bad.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=394951

 

One word about SSD. If you upgrade to SSD be aware that there are some issues when cloning from a non-SSD to SSD that decreases optimal SSD performance. A clean format/install using Windows 7 recognizes the drive and will configure / block it correctly. If you search on "Cloning HHD to SSD" you'll find tons of info about it. There is 3rd party cloning software available that handles all of this. You can also manually configure it if you know what to do. BTW I upgraded to SSD and the performance is awesome.

 

One more thing, if you are not using a 64 bit OS then you cannot use the 8GB of memory. The most a 32 bit OS can address is about 4GB.

Edited May 8, 2012 by Owsley

Some people have used extra memory to set up RAM Disk. The thread also explains some of the mechaincs of why load times are bad.

 

Yes, Bioware's idiotic "read from disk, write back to disk, read from freshly-written disk" scheme will do horrible things to performance. I think somebody on the dev team has been working with cell phone and console apps for too long. Everybody should investigate that thread.

 

One more thing, if you are not using a 64 bit OS then you cannot use the 8GB of memory. The most a 32 bit OS can address is about 4GB.

 

If they have a processor with PAE, then the OS can see beyond that limit even tho individual processes can only see a couple gigs at a time. The extra space can be used for -- say -- the ramdisk mentioned in the first part of your post.

And tbh how often do you load? when leveling almost never.

in end game? well you load flashpoints, but they are small and loads fast.

 

If you PVP a lot, your computer loads A LOT. It loads before and after every warzone, so yes, loading times is a serious issue this game has, and in my opinion, this should be addressed ASAP.

If you PVP a lot, your computer loads A LOT. It loads before and after every warzone, so yes, loading times is a serious issue this game has, and in my opinion, this should be addressed ASAP.

 

Only an issue if you try to drop in and out of pvp while doing missions on a large planet. If you're on fleet or your own ship, the load times are quite insignificant (with a decent comp that is, even on a HDD).

I'm having the same issue. I'm also experiencing client crashes that are horribly regular when going through certain loading screens. Leaving Tatooine has about a %50 crash rate for example.

 

If you'd like to do the BlackHole dailies- and you started out on fleet

 

1. load when you board the ship

2. load when you transit to correlia

3. load when you exit your ship

4. load when you board the shuttle to the BH area

 

& then you get to do the same thing when you leave if you don't want to burn your fleet pass, or want to proceed to another set of dailies. Doing the dailies you spend over 10min of every hour looking at loading screens.