Loading Times

[Roland Deschain]

Don't ask me why, but I'm extremly anal about loading times. But I just realized what parts of the hardware affect loading times. Can anybody enlighten me .

 

[oldagerocker]

so many anal and load jokes, so little time.

 

[giant384]

cpu,ram and video card(because of rendering) can cause slower load times mostly its cpu though

 

[WhiteZero]

Erm... load times are most effected by hard drive transfer speed...

 

[JNightshade]

I don't know. CPU makes an ENORMOUS difference. When I upgraded from an XP2800+ to a 64 3400+, the time it took me to load Far Cry (just the game) went from 5+ minutes to 4 seconds.

 

[WhiteZero]

I don't know. CPU makes an ENORMOUS difference. When I upgraded from an XP2800+ to a 64 3400+, the time it took me to load Far Cry (just the game) went from 5+ minutes to 4 seconds.

WTF? Is all I can say.

 

[DrDevin]

CPU, RAM and HD all affect loading times.

CPU: Is important if the program uses compressed files that must be decompressed before they can be used (it also does a few other jobs).

RAM: Is important because the game data must be stored somewhere. If you do not have enough RAM it must be loaded onto the hard drive which is much slower than RAM.

HD: Is important because the faster the game data gets off the hard drive the faster it can be decompressed and loaded into memory.

I would say RAM is the most important followed by the HD then CPU. I have gone from 256MB of RAM to 512MB to 2GB in doom 3 , far cry, hl2, battlefield 2 and other games. My load times have been cut in half to a quarter.

 

[Asus]

Having enough memory is the first thing you should make sure of. Next would be harddrive and also the chipset on the board that controls the harddrive can help a lot.

I had my raptor (10,000 RPM) on my older Athlon XP 2800+ and nForce2 board and it was quicker than my old 80GB western digital. But when I went to the Athlon 64 with nForce3 (Onboard memory controller) it was A LOT better.

 

[giant384]

harddrive would not make a difference in this matter the standard for harddrives is 7200rpm so dont tell him to upgrade harddrive cpu is the major

 

[gweedodogg69]

mainly HD speed, the hard drive is probably the slowest component in the PC. To my CPU, it feels like an eternity before the HD data reaches it. And I have raptor drives.

 

[Qonfused]

RAM and HHD, I'd say.

With WD IDE, 512MB, it took me 3 mintues to load a BF2 map. Now with Samsung SATA (3GB/s), 2GB, it takes me 15 seconds.

 

[Steven]

It's RAM I tells ya and the CPU obviously.

 

[psyno]

As long as you have sufficient memory and a modern CPU, transfer from the HDD is by far the bottleneck. It is literally orders of magnitude slower than any other transfer. You will find that the sustained data transfer rate from your HDD is inversely proportional to your load times.

If you don't want to spend money on hardware, it may help to defragment your drive, if you haven't already.