How To How to Improve Game Load Times

[Lutfij]

Computers are an incredible invention that have opened up a future of limitless possibilities. That said, waiting a long time for a video game to load up can be pretty annoying. Let's look at a few things you can do to get back to the glory days of being awed by computer technology.

Minimize Hard Drive Partitions

• Your average home user may not partition their hard drives, but if you happen to have your gaming hard drive partitioned to create multiple storage areas, this can slow down load speeds.
  • Instead of partitions, if possible, have multiple physical hard drives in your PC. Install the operating system to one of them and use the second hard drive for media storage/gaming.
• Partitions need to be directly accessed by the computer to keep tasks running. This means that each partition that houses a different game or application will be accessed while also doing basic tasks like keeping your operating system running. By keeping partitions down to a maximum of two, you can have one section for your OS and a second partition for all of your game installs.

Solid State Drive

• For the quickest load times available today you'll want to invest in a solid state drive (SSD) with more space than you need for the game. While not a set-in-stone requirement, keeping 50% of space empty on an SSD can help things run optimally. If you happen to notice slowing down load speeds on your favorite game, check your gaming hard drive to see how much of your storage is full and determine if you can free up additional space to get the hard drive under 50% full.
  
  Contrary to most guides out there, I do not recommend defragmenting your HDD to try to improve speeds. On a mechanical hard drive it adds to the wear and tear on the device. You should never run defragmentation on a solid state drive (SSD).

Reducing Background Tasks

• Another common cause for slowdowns is that too many applications are fighting for available resources. Many programs keep running in the background, whether or not you ever use them. If you don't frequently restart your machine, all these programs running for weeks on end will load up on temporary files and they start using more resources than they should.
  • Reduce how many applications launch when your computer starts up. We've covered how to do this in the past, so check out that article here. Before making any changes to the applications that launch on Windows start, get a screenshot of your current settings so you can undo anything, just in case you run into any issues.

If none of the above improves performance, you should consider taking inventory of the components in your computer to see if older components are limiting performance. This is especially common if a system has a few components upgraded, but the RAM inside the machine is older and less efficient.

In every circumstance you'll definitely want to confirm your machine meets (or exceeds) the minimum requirements for the game.

Thanks for taking the time to read up on improving game load times!

 

[Brian Boru]

Great guide!

I do not recommend defragmenting your HDD

I disagree in 2 cases:
1. Drive is ~75% or more full;
2. You just uninstalled or deleted a bunch of stuff.

Another common cause for slowdowns is that too many applications are fighting for available resources.

Absolutely. Apart from pruning the startup apps as mentioned, also close down any stuff you've opened since.
Browsers: Chrome & Firefox had serious memory leaks, so close them—and any other browser.
Game-type apps like Steam overlay, Nvidia Shadowplay, Discord, performance measure, etc.
Try with Microsoft's Game bar on and off.

If these improve things, you can gradually add back things you really like while gaming, until you find the culprit which hits performance.

 

[Lutfij]

Thank you, sir!

I will agree with your disagreement. I've had more drives fail after defragmenting than I did without defragmenting(leaving aside DoA hard disk drives, ofc).

Oddly enough I'm experiencing memory leaks on Chrome while on an i7-4770K platform but never saw any when on an A10-6800K platform,

 

[Brian Boru]

drives fail after defragmenting

Really? Never experienced or even heard of that before. There was a time I used to defrag just to watch Norton Utilities' little colored boxes jumping around in the UI and gradually see the block of fully defragged files grow—RGB eat your heart out

experiencing memory leaks on Chrome … but never saw any

Yeah, bits I read suggested it was spotty and random. Could easily be fixed now, I don't use it so don't know. The engine is sound however, the 4 browsers I use are all Chromium based.

 

[Lutfij]

little colored boxes
Yes that's how my memory of defragmenting went. I don't miss it though, LOL!

 

[Colif]

Contrary to most guides out there, I do not recommend defragmenting your HDD to try to improve speeds. On a mechanical hard drive it adds to the wear and tear on the device. You should never run defragmentation on a solid state drive (SSD).

windows will defrag drive once a month if left idle.

As for not running it on ssd, you don't need to but windows does one a month to make sure Volume shadow copy AKA System restore points are kept up to date. It only runs it on C drive though.

Storage Optimizer will defrag an SSD once a month if volume snapshots are enabled. This is by design and necessary due to slow volsnap copy on write performance on fragmented SSD volumes.

It’s also somewhat of a misconception that fragmentation is not a problem on SSDs. If an SSD gets too fragmented you can hit maximum file fragmentation (when the metadata can’t represent any more file fragments) which will result in errors when you try to write/extend a file. Furthermore, more file fragments means more metadata to process while reading/writing a file, which can lead to slower performance.

The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD?

There has been a LOT of confusion around Windows, SSDs (hard drives), and ...

www.hanselman.com

also Win 10 defrag not like the old version, its smart enough to recognise the drive and only run trim.

 

[Colif]

little colored boxes
Yes that's how my memory of defragmenting went. I don't miss it though, LOL!

I don't miss running it on Windows 98 and having screensaver start and cause Defrag to start again, as something had changed.
I don't have to miss it, I can run defraggler on my 3tb hdd and if anything has changed, sit there and watch the squares change colour. It doesn't get a lot of use really.
When I was bored in the past I would run defrag, or an anti virus scan... now I don't need to really run defrag, and AV scans don't take as long on a 6 core CPU. So I have to find something else to do when I am bored... checks windows update.