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What is the bottleneck to make loading screens faster?


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SSD drive will definitely help. Some SSDs are much faster than others but if you're coming from a spinning drive any SSD will be a performance boost.

 

It also depends which zone you are loading into. Belsavis/Corellia take longer to load. The fleet can take forever if there are lots of players standing around you meaning the engine requires extra time to all those player textures.

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Then tell me how this game would NOT benefit from skipping the 32 bit emulation it uses now and go into pure 64-bit.

 

For one thing it will be able to use more memory and not the 3 gig max it uses now.

 

If the game can buffer up more into the RAM it will decrease loading times, try upload the game in the unleashed application it will drasticly decrease the loading times the rest is about syncing with the slow gameservers.

 

The topic is about bottlenecks and loading times and what can be done to make them faster.

 

Or do you still say I am wrong and dont know what I am talking about?

 

Err what? The game proces isn't capped at 3 gb ram if you are using a 64-bit OS. That has nothing to do with whether the SWTOR client is 32 or 64 bit. So uhm yea, what you're saying doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

The client doesn't use 32-bit "emulation" - it's native 32-bit.

 

Unleashed speeds things up solely by caching game files in memory instead of having to read them from disk. Loading textures from ram to gpu will always be faster than from disk to gpu. It's basically the same speedup you get from any decently modern SSD now.

 

So uhm. What??

Edited by Asavrede
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Err what? So uhm. What??

 

Yes, a 64 bit client will improve this game.

 

For now the solutions for better loadingtimes are either use Unleashed or a SSD and hope the server is not too slow.

Edited by Icestar
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Yes, a 64 bit client will improve this game.

 

For now the solutions for better loadingtimes are either use Unleashed or a SSD and hope the server is not too slow.

 

How will a 64-bit client improve the game? None of what you have said so far is true. In fact just maintaining two codebases is likely to make bug squashing a lot harder, and therefore will make the game worse.

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So if I add a SSD, would I just move SWTOR to that drive & run it from there? Are there any other considerations if I do this?

 

You'd re-install Windows on the new SSD. Then install SWTOR like normal. However, before logging in, you could copy all the data in the SWTOR folder from your current HD and replace the newly installed folder. This will let you avoid re-downloading the 24GB or whatever it is.

 

If you're feeling lazy you could copy your whole partition to the new SSD, but I wouldnt recommend it unless you just recently did a fresh install...

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You'd re-install Windows on the new SSD. Then install SWTOR like normal. However, before logging in, you could copy all the data in the SWTOR folder from your current HD and replace the newly installed folder. This will let you avoid re-downloading the 24GB or whatever it is.

 

If you're feeling lazy you could copy your whole partition to the new SSD, but I wouldnt recommend it unless you just recently did a fresh install...

 

Is this something an average PC user can do with guidance from a few youtube instructionals? Or should I drop my rig off at geek squad?! I'm trying to avoid any 'collateral damage' :)

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Is this something an average PC user can do with guidance from a few youtube instructionals? Or should I drop my rig off at geek squad?! I'm trying to avoid any 'collateral damage' :)

 

If you are comfortable unscrewing your case to actually install the SSD, then yes I'd say Youtube videos would have the answers. As long as you dont have a weird case or special set up inside, it should pretty straight forward. Also, you may want to make sure you back up your data, just in case.

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How will a 64-bit client improve the game? None of what you have said so far is true. In fact just maintaining two codebases is likely to make bug squashing a lot harder, and therefore will make the game worse.

 

No point in arguing, you have your opinion and I have mine.

 

Time will tell who is right IF they create a better client.

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It's not a loading screen.

 

It's an overlay, that covers your screen during the loading animations.

 

You can even move, you just can't see where you are moving...

 

I'm not even sure why they added that splash screen when loading an area because there was definitely none when the game launched.

 

I'd rather be able to freely move around (like when you exit your hangar bay and use the elevator on the flee) at the cost of a lot of clipping because the area is still loading than wait passively.

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You can even move, you just can't see where you are moving...

 

I'm not even sure why they added that splash screen when loading an area because there was definitely none when the game launched.

 

I'd rather be able to freely move around (like when you exit your hangar bay and use the elevator on the flee) at the cost of a lot of clipping because the area is still loading than wait passively.

 

True, try press autorun to confirm this. The character almost always end up trying to run up a wall or a tree :tran_eek:

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You can even move, you just can't see where you are moving...

 

I'm not even sure why they added that splash screen when loading an area because there was definitely none when the game launched.

 

I'd rather be able to freely move around (like when you exit your hangar bay and use the elevator on the flee) at the cost of a lot of clipping because the area is still loading than wait passively.

 

In beta there wasn't an overlay for some loads, so occasionally you might see a colored void or the parallaxing background with no terrain, and then for 5-10 seconds you'd see terrain pop in slowly and then finally widgets and doodads like plants and crates with NPCs last. It's not bad on a hangar, but with story instances in dangerous places like Lord Grathan's Estate autorun might send you running into a pack of enemies and die.

Edited by ImpactHound
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Throw insults all you like. I've been working with PC's since before most people here were born, and my system runs just fine. I know there is a lot of activity going on during those load times, but I also know from seeing it first-hand that having a fast hard drive doesn't make those planet loading screens go by noticeably faster. I'm not making this stuff up. I've seen it.

 

Yes, in some cases there's a minor difference of a second or two that I pop in before my friend does. Most times, there's no difference at all, even though my machine would eat his for lunch.

 

I'm only talking about planet loads, which seem to take the longest... and they seem to vary, which would be very consistent with waiting for data from an external source.

 

I agree with this. While HD and memory make a slight difference, there is a bottleneck somewhere else that hampers everyone involved. Try loading into S&V with a bunch of people in VoIP...it doesn't seem to matter if you have 8GB ram or 32GB and it doesn't seem to matter if you run a SSD or a HDD - the load times are nearly identical for everyone involved.

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SSD will drastically speed up those screens with the exception of Correllia which I guess is just a giant resource hog or something.

Even with an SSD, Tatooine still takes almost half a minute. I don't see any disk access happening, so I'm presuming there's something else at work. Also got 16GB RAM.

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What surprises me is that I never seem to see that OS's cache to be adding to the speed. The loading time is almost identical when I get from Hoth onto my ship, and from my ship onto Hoth again.

That's subjective, though. I think that I'd need to test it again, but more recently it looked to me like that.

 

It's to me almost as if SWTOR war making more or less random harddisk access, not a serial one.

Which could perhaps even be true, depending how the art is stored within the files ...

Edited by AlrikFassbauer
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Well yours is an opinion - mine is fact. So yeah no point in arguing if you're just going to make stuff up.

 

Then you say that all that writes about a 64-bit client (there are hundreds of posts here) and lots of posts on other forums writing about the advantages of a 64-bit client over a old 32-bit client are wrong.

 

Perhaps you should read more before your claim that I make things up.

Edited by Icestar
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What surprises me is that I never seem to see that OS's cache to be adding to the speed. The loading time is almost identical when I get from Hoth onto my ship, and from my ship onto Hoth again.

That's subjective, though. I think that I'd need to test it again, but more recently it looked to me like that.

 

The worst part is when you are switching instance and the game fully load the area again, like it can't use what was already loaded earlier.

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Honestly think it has more to do with which character you load up.

 

I've noticed between 5 - 10 seconds difference while loading up in the same area with 2 different characters. 1 I've had since launch that has done almost everything available and 1 level 11 thats done next to nothing. The quickest loader being the level 11.

 

Bioware said a while back that the amount of variables per character are ridiculous. When you throw in legacy, quests, items, mods, armorings, enhancements, augs, mail, achievements, collections, spec, story decisions, alignment etc etc

 

Some games must handle it alot better or at least have a better structure of data to read from.

 

As the guy above me said, your pc is just a small fraction of what goes on. Hell, it could be Biowares servers slowing everything and nothing to do with the game.

 

But it seems odd how alot of us are running old machines and run the game just as good or only a fraction slower than those with mega builds

 

This is kind of an interesting point/observation. Just recently LOTRO has made a change to how some of its character data loads to speed up initial log in. The data that was slowing the load significantly, but has lesser impact, their Skirmish history data, now loads after the character is in world, though to be honest I haven't noticed much difference.

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This is kind of an interesting point/observation. Just recently LOTRO has made a change to how some of its character data loads to speed up initial log in. The data that was slowing the load significantly, but has lesser impact, their Skirmish history data, now loads after the character is in world, though to be honest I haven't noticed much difference.

 

DDO apparingly did the same - both are by Turbine.

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