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What is the bottleneck to make loading screens faster?


Fappa

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Is it your internet connection? Hard drive (and thus an SSD would help)? Is it your CPU?

 

Or is it just the servers that we have no control over?

 

Its the process to load the graphic elements into the FP memory on the graphic card.

 

So OS+HD+Memory on both GPU and CPU and having free cycle on the PCI bus.

 

My issue was due to my old 3ware sharing the IRQ/DMA with my nVidia 9800 GT.

 

Replaced it for a 560 TI and voila sub 20s load time despite my old 3Gbps only 3ware card.

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Hard drive mostly and memory for load times. What are you using currently?

 

Just a normal 7200rpm HD. I guess I was just wondering if the load screen when you change zones was entirely my hard drive, or if it had anything to do with the server.

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I'm using a 128MB SSD, so I don't think the bottleneck is the drive. I'm also using a 50Gb connection, so I don't think that's it either.

 

I just think there's a lot of work they need to do to better optimize their servers. Never had a game take so long to zone... and I played EQ.

 

It's really not too big a deal until you get into class quests that send you all over, but still I really hope they improve this.

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Its the process to load the graphic elements into the FP memory on the graphic card.

 

So OS+HD+Memory on both GPU and CPU and having free cycle on the PCI bus.

 

My issue was due to my old 3ware sharing the IRQ/DMA with my nVidia 9800 GT.

 

Replaced it for a 560 TI and voila sub 20s load time despite my old 3Gbps only 3ware card.

 

Hmm, I'm using a 6970 and I still get terrible load times. Think there are any settings I could tweak via CCC to improve it?

 

Would love to see <20s load times lol

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Hmm, I'm using a 6970 and I still get terrible load times. Think there are any settings I could tweak via CCC to improve it?

 

Would love to see <20s load times lol

 

Have a "real" pro look at your computer?

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I am sorry that so many of you are having issues with load times. More RAM might help, possibly...depending on your situation.

 

My load times are actually pretty good, though it does take a pretty long time to swap from one shard to another. Other than that, though, it's pretty speedy for me. Hopefully this is something they patch up sooner rather than later. I know how annoying loading screens can be.

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I'm using a 128MB SSD, so I don't think the bottleneck is the drive. I'm also using a 50Gb connection, so I don't think that's it either.

 

I just think there's a lot of work they need to do to better optimize their servers. Never had a game take so long to zone... and I played EQ.

 

It's really not too big a deal until you get into class quests that send you all over, but still I really hope they improve this.

 

Pretty much this, the game needs to be optimized in future builds. I've got a NASA computer and still loads slow for me.

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It's not a loading screen.

 

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

 

Yeah, sometimes the overlay dont cover the sides... and you can see a few pixels on the right and left side of the window loading up =D

Edited by IPaq
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The thing about load times - they once were much better. During the last weeks of beta I filled out several forms where I stated that I found the load times 'acceptable'. But after one of the maintenances around EGA and Release Day, suddenly load times went up for everyone drastically. And no matter where I go or log in, the progress bar always halts for a long time at about 25%. Like, absolutely always.

 

To make matters worse - try switching your instance. You'll get the full loading screen experience despite staying on the same planet, in the same spot. They are unloading the entire data and reloading it again. This makes me think that somehow, previously assets that were being kept in use were also kept in memory, while now everything is purged entirely and then loaded from scratch.

 

Which, to me, looks like a very cheap band-aid fix to a memory leak. Instead of fixing the leak, the game just dumps it all and loads it anew.

Edited by Mephane
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When I overclock my ATI, the loading screens seem to take less time to load -as opposed to when I forget to switch to my overclocking settings and log in.

 

I can surely tell a huge difference in gameplay performance, both in the game and the loading screens, when I have my ATI overclocked.

 

*disclaimer - Overclocking can destroy your PC an voids your Warranties.

Edited by Zebular
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When I overclock my ATI, the loading screens seem to take less time to load -as opposed to when I forget to switch to my overclocking settings and log in.

 

I can surely tell a huge difference in gameplay performance, both in the game and the loading screens, when I have my ATI overclocked.

 

Well OCing help setting up the textures in the card memory.

Edited by IPaq
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SSD definitelly

I'll make you a little movie about loading times now and post it later, then see for yourself.

My system is:

 

Asus P8Z68-V PRO

i5 2500k stock

8gb DDR3 Ram

Evga GTX 570 SC

OCZ Agility 3 (RUnnin Windows)

OCZ Vertex 3 (Running the games inclusive SWTOR)

 

Then you can compare my loading times with yours.

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Is it your internet connection? Hard drive (and thus an SSD would help)? Is it your CPU?

 

Or is it just the servers that we have no control over?

 

It's not likely something you have much control over. My machine here is a beast with lots of RAM, good video and a fast SSD. I play with a friend on a much lower-grade machine, and our load times are almost identical. Some planets just take forever to load up, and when they do, they take forever for both of us.

 

I suspect some of it is the speed data comes down over the network, and if that's the case there's not much to be done.

Edited by imtrick
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It's not likely something you have much control over. My machine here is a beast with lots of RAM, good video and a fast SSD. I play with a friend on a much lower-grade machine, and our load times are almost identical. Some planets just take forever to load up, and when they do, they take forever for both of us.

 

I suspect some of it is the speed data comes down over the network, and if that's the case there's not much to be done.

 

Really?

 

You guys cannot understand or even bother looking at the Task Manager / GPU Monitoring during a loading screen and see what's happening?

 

If you did you'll see the FB goes to 0% at 25% load, swtor.exe getting more memory while HD read goes up to 100%, then the FB usage climbing while the GPU goes to 99%. When everything is loaded, my FB is up to 17%, the GPU drop to ~50%, HD to almost 0%, and ~25% for the CPU Cores.

 

Sad.

 

PS: Solution, get your putter to a "real" computer guy and have him fix it properly. My load time is under 20s and my putter barely cost 1k to build.

Edited by IPaq
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Really?

 

You guys cannot understand or even bother looking at the Task Manager / GPU Monitoring during a loading screen and see what's happening?

 

If you did you'll see the FB goes to 0% at 25% load, swtor.exe getting more memory while HD read goes up to 100%, then the FB usage climbing while the GPU goes to 99%. When everything is loaded, your my FB is up to 17%, the GPU drop to ~50%, HD to almost 0%, and ~25% for the CPU Cores.

 

Sad.

 

PS: Solution, get your putter to a "real" computer guy and have him fix it properly. My load time is under 20s and my putter barely cost 1k to build.

 

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.

Edited by imtrick
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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.

 

Don't boast. It looks bad when you cant:

 

. Come up with ways to figure out what's happening;

. Figure out solutions;

 

So figure out which system is holding you back... it ain't hard since, now, you have the solution

 

PS: I'm not going to bore ppl with my RL activities...

 

PS1: What insult? People keep complaining the game is crap, they keep telling us they are computer gods, and they can't/won't even do the simplest task as the ones I listed.

Edited by IPaq
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Really?

 

You guys cannot understand or even bother looking at the Task Manager / GPU Monitoring during a loading screen and see what's happening?

 

If you did you'll see the FB goes to 0% at 25% load, swtor.exe getting more memory while HD read goes up to 100%, then the FB usage climbing while the GPU goes to 99%. When everything is loaded, my FB is up to 17%, the GPU drop to ~50%, HD to almost 0%, and ~25% for the CPU Cores.

 

Sad.

 

PS: Solution, get your putter to a "real" computer guy and have him fix it properly. My load time is under 20s and my putter barely cost 1k to build.

 

Sorry this is pure nonsense.

 

I have a PC custom boutique, and have been building true high end rigs for 14 years now.

 

We have tried last couple of days with borh ultra highend machines with Raid 0 SSD arrays with almost 1750 MB (Mega Bytes not bits !) throughput the latest AMD and Nvdia GPU s , loads of RAM and so on, and compared them side by side with some 2, 5 and even 6 year old PC we had lying around in the storage room.

 

The difference on planet or shard switching loading screens only benefit a little from being run on the ultra high end rigs compared to the older ones. We also tried pdifferent ISP internet connections that peer on different backbone structure to rule that out.

 

Yes a highend machine is ofcourse always better than an older one, but you wont see the big improvement the hardware should warrant.

 

The problem or bottleneck lies at Biowares end, unfortunately.

Edited by Rheemus
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I have a question related to this topic:

 

Any idea why my loading times are always higher while logging into certain characters? My main takes a lot longer than my alt.

 

Likely a different planet or if not a differnt shard its loading from.

Edited by Rheemus
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