Is it just me or are loading times getting worse in new games?

[Veronica Winston]

So I've been playing a bunch of new games lately, and I swear I'm spending more time staring at loading screens than actually playing. Like, I get that graphics are getting better and all, but come on! I've got an SSD and a decent rig, but some of these games take forever to load. Anyone else noticed this, or is it just my setup? It's driving me nuts, especially when I only have a short time to game. What gives?

 

[Colif]

if its on ssd now, it would't get any faster by swapping to a faster ssd. The benefit gained by getting faster ssd is smaller the faster they get. You may not notice a difference at all.

I don't play that many new games but its possible they do take longer now. More complicated graphics. It really depends what type of games you play.

What are specs of the PC?

 

[McStabStab]

Could also be that they're new games. When you're replaying games that you've loaded into recently the RAM helps carry the load.

But yes, there are some giant games out there with lots of resources. Any particular offenders you're referring to?

 

[mjs warlord]

I think one of the reasons some games take a long time to load is because shader optimisers and other similar processors run every time a game loads and i am sure this never used to happen.

A perfect example of this is Horizon Zero Dawn , the optimisers run every time the game launches and you can tell it is happening because the small waterfall graphic on the main screen stutters. When the optimiser has stopped the waterfall runs smoothly.

 

[McStabStab]

I think one of the reasons some games take a long time to load is because shader optimisers and other similar processors run every time a game loads and i am sure this never used to happen.

A perfect example of this is Horizon Zero Dawn , the optimisers run every time the game launches and you can tell it is happening because the small waterfall graphic on the main screen stutters. When the optimiser has stopped the waterfall runs smoothly.

Agreed, anyone who plays COD Warzone is well aware of the shader load time pains. Preloading the shaders definitely helps the game run more consistently and then dumping the cache following a play session frees up the resources again*. The price of beauty.

*The second part about the cache I'm just assuming, I don't know how it actually works but in my brain it makes sense because why else would I have to pre-load shaders every time I boot up the game?

 

[Brian Boru]

Re above 2 posts:

Can ISPs not save online gaming caches like they save other content you access frequently?

 

[Zimbaly]

Depends on the game and yeah SSD or not it seems to make no difference. My solution is to play older games. They all load hella fast now so I don't have to wait.

Also I hate shader loading.....

 

[Zloth]

Good topic.

Yeah, shaders are a big deal. Also, the game worlds are getting larger and larger. If the game wants to keep track of every sweet roll you've picked up, so it isn't there again when you come back, it has to put that in the save file and then deal with it when loading the save game, too.

All in all, though, I don't think loading times are getting worse. Some games take longer than others, but the average time it takes these days seems about the same as what it was back when we all had spinning platter hard drives. (I think the days when we had nothing but floppy disks were faster, but it's difficult to remember.)

I suspect that, as our storage systems get faster and other hardware improves, developers are using it for other things. When some new breakthrough happens, devs don't say "Great, now our game will load in 2 seconds instead of 20!," they say "Great, now we can do all this cool stuff with the extra 18 seconds we have to load the game!"

 

[Brian Boru]

I can definitely say the days of loading from cassette tapes were slower—99% of the time you had to rewind the ****** first!
Sticking a hexagonal-octagonal pencil thru the tape hole and twirling usually worked well

floppy disks were faster, but it's difficult to remember

Not sure either. Definitely painful were those games which made you frequently swap between the various floppies the game came on, if I recall correctly as you moved around and revisited old locations. The whole 'find the floppy' was a lot slower than clicking an icon. I recall Myst took quite a while to load from CD.

keep track of every sweet roll you've picked up

Wouldn't you just track objects 'state' in the game's DB—absent, invisible etc—which I assume would speed things?

 

[Colif]

Cassette was slower indeed. writing out a game from a magazine to play also took time. Imagine if PC Gamer put the code to a new game in a magazine to type out - how many days do you have... that and games not written in BASIC any more.

Not sure either. Definitely painful were those games which made you frequently swap between the various floppies the game came on,

It could be worse

Depends on the game and yeah SSD or not it seems to make no difference.

often the increase isn't worth the cost of upgrade, I could run pcie4 drives but I don't see need to get a new boot drive unless it forces me. Then I could get pcie4 but time gained isn't worth it before.

 

[Brian Boru]

It could be worse

Daammmnnnn… I thought for a minute he was doing it for real!
But hey, at least they were formatted floppies—save a whole load of time that way.

Insert Disk 2835 and press any key to continue…

Disk 2835 is unreadable, (A)bort or (R)etry?

System message: You've hit (R)etry 47 times, it's not gonna work, cancelling operation, go for a walk.

 

[Slasken]

how much space do you have left?

 

[Zloth]

Wouldn't you just track objects 'state' in the game's DB—absent, invisible etc—which I assume would speed things?

Probably not a straight up database... well, actually, maybe they are something like databases? Whatever the case, you've got to turn the bytes on the disk into something in memory. They normally can't just take a snapshot of your memory at the time of your save and dump the whole block to disk, then load it back in again when you want to play again. (They might be able to pull something like that off if they had us play our games on a virtual machine. Then they could simply save the state of the whole fake computer: game, OS, junk running in the background, all of it!)

... writing out a game from a magazine to play also took time. Imagine if PC Gamer put the code to a new game in a magazine to type out - how many days do you have...

4F, 1A, 02, 60, 2B, 2F.... <shudder>

Even with the CRC checks they eventually gave us to help us find typos, I'm not so sure any one person could get it done before they died of old age. Just a static menu screen picture would at 1920x1280 would be over two million of those two-character hex numbers!

 

[Frag Maniac]

IMO load times ARE getting longer, but it's only noticeable if you don't keep up on drive technology. Just like games require more robust GPUs as game development evolves, they also require upgrading drives. Otherwise anyone without at least a gen 4 NVMe drive these days is going to notice slower load times.

And as far as shader optimizer times, that has more to do with your CPU. There's not a current game I've played (and most are ones with shader optimizers) that is slow to load, or slow to optimize.

We can either be upset about this, or realize if we were not to upgrade when necessary, we'd still be using MB vs GB capacity drives, and not be able to fit ANY modern games on them! Not to mention they'd be slow as molasses IDE drives instead of SATA!