LOADING TIMES: if you have slow loads, read this

[x^n]

If your hard disk is thrashing like a shark in a feeding frenzy then you really need to visit crucial.com. And a 16MB video card just isn't gonna cut it these days. Sorry dude.

[illimiter]

Turning of Anisotropic Filtering and Detailed Shaders significantly reduced load times on my machine. I keep them on though since even with them on I get an initial load of about 30sec and subsequent loads of about 10sec (subjectively guessing the times).

[Sinister_Evil]

My pc is crap compared to some listed in the thread but i get a nice 40 sec cold load and an even better warm....the only prob is that quik save takes more time that it would to access the menu and save from there...and just to give credit to some in the thread i have a 7200 western digital HD

[Jed Dye]

System:

 

Tandy 1000TX

768KB Ram

Tandy 16 color EGA card

20Mb HDD

 

 

my loading times are 52 hours. In fact, I haven't played the first level yet.

[Protuber]

My system:

 

AMD XP1800+

Samsung DDR2700 512Mb

Leadtek 250 Ultra (Ti4600) o/c 315/702

IBM 60Gb AVVA07

SB Audigy

WinXP

 

Load time about 5 min. Quickload time is fine. Game perfomance very slow about 20 fps (on my system ). Where is the patch???

May be try to re-install WinXp

BTW Soldier of Fortune 2 has same problems on my system.

[bookgrub]

So many people are recommending large swap files as a way to boost performance.

 

Well, depending on the system, maybe - but check your UNUSED PHSYICAL MEMORY and SWAPFILE IN USE counters first.

 

my system:

 

duron 1ghz

256 ddr pc2100

8gb dma33 ide

epox 8kha mobo

84mb swap file (yes, that's right, not 384)

 

After 3 days solid of lan gaming on ghost recon, cs and ut (didn't have jk2 then) with NO RESTARTS on win98 orig, I had used only 47.4mb of my swap file. A large swap file is no good unless you know you'll need it - otherwise it's just taking up space. For win98 use sysmon.exe to monitor these usage stats - not sure what the 2k or xp equiv. is.

 

The "need large swap file" fix is _mostly_ a hold over from the bad old days of Unreal or quake 1/2 with 32mb ram etc. When you're talking _at least_ 8 times that much ram nowadays, it doesn't often apply.

 

Bookgrub

[hiawathaboy]

My load times were multiple minutes when running in XP Pro. I dual booted to Win98 and the load times are always fast (20-40 seconds for long loads).

 

Before dual boot:

1X100 GB partition (NTFS) running WinXP

 

After dual boot:

2X20GB partitions (FAT32) running Win98 and WinXP

1X60 GB partition (FAT32)

 

AthlonXP 1600+

Shuttle AK31 rev3

WD 100GB 7200 rpm

256MB pc2100 DDR

Geforce 2 MX (32 MB)

SB Live! 5.1

[chopp3r]

win 98 se

p4 1.7 512 ddr333 ram

Gigabyte mb Sis 645 chipset (latest agp patch applied)

IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40GB hard drive

Geforce4 ti 4200 128 mb ddr (new dets 4.13.01.2942)

 

fresh defrag, 1 gig swap file, have experimented with agp aperture size, texture detail, com_hunkmegs, reinstallation nothing helps...same approx load times no matter the graphics setting

PLEASE wtf is the deal? Also I have nothing else running besides JKII!

My load times are 5 minutes approx!!! I just got this game and only played a few times before applying the 1.03 patch....seems like the load times started getting bad around that time...but I am also just about 1/4 through the game...I die so much that most of my time is wasted waiting for the game to load...like the snapshot will be there and the saber progress meter takes forever(5 minutes or so) to come up...when it does it loads fast if that means anything?

Also when I die then ESC and load again the sound stutters for a while...sound also stutters when I quit the program.

please help I am goin inSANE

thanks

 

****UPDATE

Well 1 thing noone has been mentioning- at what point in the game is this long load time hell happening?

 

I experienced the worst of my load time woes on the level..Nar Shaddaa Streets....It has cleared up for the time being and I am back to very reasonable load times...30 secs maybe cold..5 secs warm-

hopefully it is just a problem with ns_streets??????

 

cya

[Chiles4]

I haven't read thru this whole thread and it's been a long while since I last posted in it but here's some food for thought...

 

I just upgraded my motherboard from an older KT266-based board with FSB at 133 to a KT266A board with FSB set to 150. Also upgraded from a Kyro 2 with 64MB to a highly overclocked GF3 Ti 200 with 64MB.

 

Result? Level load times were exactly as they were before!

Cold: ~45 seconds

Warm: ~10 seconds.

 

I'm using Win98SE. First system had a large fixed swap file and second system had no fixed swap file. And still no difference in load times.

 

This led me to the conclusion that (at least for me) load times were completely dependent on hard drive speed. My IBM 60GXP 7200rpm drive benchmarks identically on the old and new systems with HDTach (free download - see google). This makes sense considering it is the slowest component on my PC.

 

With HDTach my IBM 60GXP comes in at an average read speed of ~39MB/sec. You might want to try this utility and compare your avg. read speed as well as your load times to mine. When I upgraded from a 2yr-old 7200rpm drive to a 1yr-old IBM 7200rpm drive, the speed of my machine increased dramatically.

 

No offence intended but if you're getting several minute load times, make sure that DMA is enabled on that drive. HDTach is a good way to confirm this as well as tell you how fast your drive is. If don't have DMA enabled on a hard drive, HDTach will come back with pitiful 5MB/s average read speeds.

 

One note about HDTach: you have to turn off auto-insert on all CD-type drives before running it or it will puke.

[FalloutGod]

USELESSS...............

[Simmy241]

I have an Athlon 1.6

512 Mb Ram (non-DDR )

Windows XP Pro

Created a second partition for running games ONLY on with a fixed swap file (2 1/2 x your total RAM is the size you want) created on both partitions.

 

GeForce 2 MX 64Mb DDR

 

Sound Blaster LIVE! 5.1 Sound card

 

Running 1024x768 32bit

 

Load times are awesome even for saves.

 

Not choppy at all.

 

I did notice a difference at one point though. I tried running in Window mode and had my shadows to max and it was HORRIBLE!!

 

I changed back to FULL screen and I got my performance back WITH shadows set to max.

[SamuelDravis]

i have a 866mhz system with a 40gb 7200rpm HD, radeon 7200 and the game runs fine maxed out exept for the volumetric shadows.

the load times for me are about 1-2 mins.

the increase performance for me might be because i am using VirtualDrive. it is a utility that copies the cd onto your HD, so that it acts like a regular CD-ROM drive in windows explorer. so it runs the cd at about 200x.

you can order it here

[mich2112]

Originally posted by murkish

As I said earlier my save files were bloated(around 10 MB). I took the advice of someone's prior post and made a few changes to my graphics and then changed them back. This did not fix it immediately, but when it saved at the next checkpoint, I was back to 7 second loads. Also, the save file was back to about 1MB.

 

I have the exact same problem as you. The files got large and the quick loads have become 75-80 seconds. I have a p4-1.7 GHZ with 256 MB RAM and a Geforce 2, 256 MB card. I'm running at 800x600 resolution.

 

My started at the Cairn_assembly area as well.

[oodbnar]

my loading times are very fast

i have 512DRR and a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and its fine 4 me

[darrenhudson]

again i am experiencing the same delays in loading and saving games. again i have a windows 2000, voodoo 3000 card, 256 ram fairly ok pc, the game plays fine once loaded regardless of the resolution, graphics details etc.

 

Yes tweaking the settings from medium, to high or very high, does speed up the loading times, but eventually affects the color settings of the pc once I have exited from the game. My fix has involves restarting the game if i want to load a saved game. plenty of saves etc.

 

there is mention that windows maybe better suited to the game which i will try shortly.

[darrenhudson]

again i am experiencing the same delays in loading and saving games. again i have a windows 2000, voodoo 3000 card, 256 ram fairly ok pc, the game plays fine once loaded regardless of the resolution, graphics details etc.

 

Yes tweaking the settings from medium, to high or very high, does speed up the loading times, but eventually affects the color settings of the pc once I have exited from the game. My fix has involves restarting the game if i want to load a saved game. plenty of saves etc.

 

there is mention that windows 98 maybe better suited to the game with the voodoo card which i will try shortly.

[.Templar.]

Well I dont understand why you all are loading so slow on such fast computers, i havent tried single player with this athlon 1.1ghz, but when i played sp my comp was an Intel Celeron 800mhz, windows ME, 512mb SDR RAM gf2 mx400 on 800x600 res with all settings turned up and the longest load time was probably 30 seconds, and thats from when i first boot the game up, and yes, ALL SETTINGS UP, i rarely had any fps issues, the lowest it got was probably 15-20 which is very easy to deal with

[NuclearDoDo]

I have gone all over this forum looking for the answer to my problems and all i find is ppl having mass problems of their own which are at least in some way a variance of mine.

 

I'm beginning to think its the stupid line of sound cards that Creative put out years ago, the Soundblaster live series. Nearly Everyone who has a somesort of lag/load problem has a Soundblaster card. I think its about time that someone at either Microsoft or Creative or Lucasarts or even Raven Software put their fu**ing heads together and put out a patch. A program that has this many complaints around the world definitely should not have been released without an optional patch yet. To all the pansy-a$$ corporations I am officially giving you the finger to shove up your capitalistic a$$holes.

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[Alesh]

I have and Athlon XP 2000+ (1666 Mhz) Geforce 4 mx 440 sound blaster 5.1 and 256 Mb of ram (ddr 333 mhz), and it loads slowly, comparing this pc with the one i had the time i bought JO (Athlon 900, 256 Mb of ram (133 mhz), geforce 2 mx 400 and sound blaster live! value), the loading times are almost the same, and i think i had the settings at max with that one too.

 

One thing i notices is setting "com_hunkmegs" to a little les than your ram mbs might help a little (don't expect much).

[AAstaroth0]

I actually have the opposite problem, at least opposite to what everyone else is stating. My initial loads are fine, but on certain levels (IE First Cloud City level) the Reloads lock up. The initial load takes maybe 15 seconds, but I've left it reloading for over half and hour (just to see if it would load) and it never gets beyond about 1/4 of the way across. I have a VooDoo 3000 (Yes, I know its old, but I don't play alot of games, so it works for me) with 512 MB of PC 133 RAM, with an AMD 1ghz processor on Win 2k Pro. Just thought I'd throw that out there if anyone knew of anything that could cause that.

[AngryCookieman]

This problem is not an amd or voodo problem. I was having it with a pentium 4 and nvida gf2. I fixed it by going back to the 44.03 drivers from last year. Now I cold load in about 20sec and warm load in maybe 5. I think that the newer drivers are not really optimized for the geforce cards, just the fx series. This also fixed the extreme lag in the menus and in-game video problems I was having. I suspect a similar problem with the other cards drivers. And to the person who said it was creative's problem, i'm using the audigy2 with no problems at all, and the sound is great. Hope this helps someone

[Zubaz]

i have windows xp service pack 1, 128 mb ram AMD athlon 1600+ with a geforce 2 mx with latest drivers and i get awesome load times on 1024x768x32 on very high. Introduction 23 seconds, death 5 seconds, quick save/load almost instant!

[big-cross]

specs

p4 3.0 h.t.

64 meg nivida card

512 mg ddr 3200 ram

5400 rpm hard drive

 

as of right now i am building that computer part by part (on avery pay check i put some thing better in it) back to what was saying,

had slow load time but only after i did a lot of downloading (stuped kazaa) but i got this program from kazaa it's cald pc booster. i really dident think to much of it tell i tryed it. it did good really good. my pc now run so much better with faster load time.

give it a try you might like it.:compcry:

 

p.s wacht what you get from kazaa it may be a virus. keep bull dog(your kazaa anti-virus) or your anti-virus up to date.

 

over and out

[eniaC]

System:

Dell Dim. 4300

1.4 P4

two 256 sdrRAM sticks (cant add any more)

GeForce 2 MX/MX 400

Virtual Mem. set to 1676 (don't let windows manage)

 

I have perfectly fine load times and FPS rate's with this lemon, surely you can do better.

 

1)delete cookies and temp. files regularly.

2)crank up that VM

3)set details to high not very high

4)turn detailed shaders off.

5)set shadows to simple

6)wallmarks and llightflares off

 

With these setting you can still enjoy the beautiful graphics along with good performance, but tweaking and adjusting to your own system's needs and running different settings is the best way to find the settings your sustem runs best.

 

 

:r2d2:eniaC

 

*edited* Oh yeah, my Cable conn. plays a imp. part in my load times (downloads are about 176kbps on average, don't really know my rate and all that jazz)