LOADING TIMES: if load times are long for you, read this (UPDATED!)

[Chiles4]

I understand where you're coming from Hellbinder but my solution was pretty obvious - don't play on Very High detail. Maybe they should have just left that option out or made it available only if you have an XP 2000+ proc with a SCSI Raid 0 Array. I play at High Detail on a Kyro 2 and the game looks awesome. I've heard from others that Very High detail is not really playable and causes thrashing - as a result I don't use it. My "cold" and "warm" load times were 40 seconds and 10 seconds and I won't classify my box as a monster machine:

 

1.2Ghz Tbird

512MB DDR

IBM 60GXP 7200rpm HDD

 

So far some, the load times are a non-issue. But at some point even my box will be too out of date and probably require a upgrade to get acceptable performance.

[TCPVIP]

I found this in another forum. My load times are atrocious as I know are a lot of yours. I can't try it out because I am at work at the moment Post if it works or if it is crap. Hope this helps...

 

 

Gawen Crow sent the following about Q3-engine memory managment:

There is a file in the \GameData\base\ folder called jk2mpconfig.cfg. Open this file with notepad and search for a setting called hunkmegs. Default it says hunkmegs "64". This is the amount of RAM the game is set to utilize for graphics rendering. Performance can be drastically increased on machines with 256+ meg of RAM by increasing the hunkmegs value to 192 for 256k machines. As long as it does not exceed 2/3 of your total RAM your ok, so the value can be set even higher for machines with 512. After changing the value just click on save and play the game & wallah!

[Qel]

I dunno whether this was mentioned before....but I noticed that

compress texture option was missing in the video options menu...

 

I find this odd for a game that is using Quake 3 engine...RTCW and MOH:AA has it!!!

 

It is also mentioned in the manual on page 31 that there is

compress texture option.....it increases game's loading speed...

 

Raven devs pls explain...Thanks;)

 

Qel

[Emon]

I think many people are forgetting another HUGE factor in load time; your hard drive speed! If you have a 5,400 RPM UDMA 33 drive like I do, your load times will suck! If you have a 7,200 UDMA 100 drive your load times will be awesome.

 

Hard drive farts (your HDD loads like crazy and your framerate drops) is also due to a slow HDD. Since JK2 runs on OpenGL, and OpenGL is very CPU intensive, and since IDE drives use the CPU, if your hard drive is have a tough time loading stuff (like music) it will draw more CPU useage and your performance will suffer. For people like me this happens in JK2, but not in games like Max Payne or Ghost Recon. This is because those games run on Direct3D, which in my opinion, is now superior to OpenGL.

 

[/rant]

[SkyLightWalker]

Are you guys weird or something? What are you trying to do? I've got a measely AMD600MHz, 256mb RAM and a PCI ATI Rage card. Now I run 640x480 on High Geometric detail and Medium texture detail, with 16-bit for both colour depth and texture colours or whatever its called. I also use low sound quality, but I do have dynamic lights, and decals on. Now my loading times are less than 30 seconds - as in the first time you load a level.

 

In my humble opinion, the game looks fantastic on my PC - Its fine. On a higher spec PC, I'd expect more, but considering my specs, I'm VERY happy with it. I don't experience any slow down that makes it unplayable (except that mining level near the start - outside that was a bit slow).

 

I don't know what kind of settings you guys are trying to run, but I think you maybe overestimating! Having said that, my does fine, and its VERY average.

 

People put their settings at absurd levels then complain when it doesn't work properly - I think people need to be a liittle more content with what they've got

 

Otherwise my big bad AT-AT is gonna kick yo ass!

[SkyLightWalker]

Aik - Is 10 - 15 seconds slow?

 

Is this guy taking the piss?

[SkyLightWalker]

None of you should be having ANY problems at all, you all keep quoting these ridiculously fast PCs, and mine runs it fine, and it is distinctly average!

 

Stop complaining, and just turn down the settings from "SUPER COMPUTER FROM THE FUTURE" and all problems will be solved.

 

[taldoren]

Reading a few of these posts, I am assuming that most here do keep there systems up to date regading drivers etc.. however I often find that most only update there Video/sound drivers as a matter of course.

 

If you are having issues with the loading times etc.. is to also make sure that all your MB specific drivers are also updated. One of the most important one of these of course is your HDD controler drivers. Make sure you are running the best (not allways the lates) ultra ATA storage drivers.

 

Also make sure that you run dxdiag and check that all the Ddraw options are listed as enabled.. again most of the time these are attributed to the MB/AGP/PCI compatability.

 

I know its a compramise between cost and performace. But if you want the latest games to run nice etc, then really you have to be willing to upgrade you machine almost every 6 - 12 months max.

 

Also Whatever OS you are running make sure that you keep the service packs up to date as well.

 

Just FYI I have very little load times, mesured in secs on the following specd machine

 

P4 2GHz

ASUS P4t-2 MB

512 RDRAm (400Mhz)

UDMA 7200 60GB IBM 2MB HDD

Herc Ti500 V3 64MB

SB Live (yeah i know gotta upgrade that)

 

AGP Apature size set to 128MB (tested several Benchmarks and games found this to be the best)

No OC as yet

Win98

Win2K Sp2

 

Game runs smooth at 1600*1200 Max everything, (Just a sight dissapointment at the visuals at this stage, just doing force training.. expecting the Light Sabre to improve the visualss somewhat)

 

Hope this is of some help anyhoo.

[dalavita]

My load times are 25 seconds starting a new game.

 

I play at res 800 x 600 x 32 bit

medium geometric detail and medium texture detail.

The rest is maxed out.

 

quick loads are about 4 seconds for me.

 

I have a P3 1 Ghz

384 Mb pc 133 ram

Geforce 2 GTS @220/375

20 Gb hd @ 7200 rpm...

 

And ingame fps rox. I had 110 fps while fighing Desann.

So experiment with the detail levels and youll get good reload times and good fps. BTW update all your drivers to.

[Swifty]

Originally posted by Chico

ok, let me restate what I said at first. MP load times are fine. Its the single player load times that kill me. Athlon xp 1900, 512 megs ddr, GF3 (original). Loading up the single player, I LITERALLY had time to go fix myself a snack in the kitchen and pour a drink before it was finished loading.

 

I am in a similar boat here:

 

AMD XP 1700+

512 DDR

ASUS A7VE

40gig ATA100 Deskstar

Radeon 8500

Audigy

WinXP Pro.

 

The load times are horrendous. True, I have my settings cranked a bit, but the game plays fine, it just loads s-l-o-w....The HD isn't even accessing, nor is the CD. I am fully patched up to date.

 

Someone asked about Wolfenstein, and it loaded MUCH faster than JO. LOVE this game, but after I die a couple times, access the load screen (why it didn't default to load your last quicksave is beyond me), and wait for my hair to grow, I've had enough, and I'll stop playing.

[WHIPP]

OK, as I posted I have seen crashes in single player using a Redeon 64mb videocard. Now, I tried entering into a MP game once, and the game crashed. Anyone else having this trouble? My system also includes Athlon XP 1500+ and 512 mb RAM. I just thought of something, I have the FSB overclocked at 147, and I should return it to the defauly 133 and see if the problems still happen. I know that with return to castkle wolfenstein, when I had the fsb at 150 or higher I saw crashes. I bet JO taxes the system more than RTCW!

[nep3d]

2.2 Ghz, 1024 Mb Rams *DDR*, and a 52" Monitor *Screenie*, 1TB and it runs like heaven on highest detail.

The cause to the gigantic sytem gb *TB* is because its a com from a company

[Darth_Skavaen]

Not sure why you need a big CPU, tons of ram and a supreme video card. I have the game running on 3 machines,

 

 

1rst machine

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Intel Celeron 800 (Hewlet Packard xt919)

5400 RPM 40GB HDD

40X CDROM

512MB SDRAM

PCI GeForce2 MX400 64MB SDRAM

 

Load Time:20-30 seconds

Reload Time:10-15 seconds

 

2nd machine

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

AMD Athlon 750

5400 RPM 20GB HDD

16X Pioneer DVD drive

640MB SDRAM

AGP GeForce2 MX200 32MB SDRAM

 

Load Time:20-30 seconds

Reload Time: 10-15 seconds

 

3rd machine

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

AMD K6-2 350

5400 RPM 15GB HDD

32X Toshiba CDROM

256MB SDRAM

AGP GeForce256 32MB SDRAM

 

Load Time:25-40 seconds

Reload time: 10-20 seconds

 

Now, these times were taken after a fresh install of the game and no settings were altered.

[Mentat88]

Chico, you're a loser.

That you were describing your GPU's

Load times mainly fall on the shoulders of the CPU.

DEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

[Wormstrangler]

to combat load times i put textures to medium and 16bit depth. Just then i turned on texture compression (thru my Kyro 2 control panel) and i turned textures to max and 32bit, and its loading approx. the same without tex. compression and on medium textures. So Tex. Compression helps

 

BTW my load times are around 30 seconds i think, which i find is still to slow....

 

1.4ghz T-Bird

256mb DDR

Kyro 2 64mb

Abit KG7

[FRIGHT]

1.2 t-bird

512 mb sdram 133 not ddr =(

 

50 sec initial load in new game.

 

enough time to run to the kitchen and grab a soda

or

take a quick piss

 

way better than the game SiN (quake II modified engine)

remember that game?

the load times gave me enough time to smoke a cig

then the patch...

 

rambling...the point is do something in the load time to make it seem quick =P

[Lucky]

I had incredibly poor load times with RTCW and i figured out why it was just in time for JK2, it was cause after my last format I fergot to install my damn hd drivers.

 

Thats one thing that i bet most folks overlook on format, installing hd drivers. The generic drivers from microsoft are terrible and it reduced my load times in rtcw by 2/3'ds.

 

I'm spoiled by JK's insta loads, so i keep my detail cranked all the way down so that it pops up in under 10 seconds. It actually loads just as fast as JK, which is impressive.

 

It takes me about a minute for a fresh load off the highest detail, but I don't have enough ram to deal with it and it starts to chug after 10 minutes of play. Monster machine with only 128 mb of ram, I need to buy some more but I'm lazy. =P

 

I suggest you guys try updating yer hd drivers if at all possible. Might help immensely or not at all.

 

Also the textures are *really* detailed at the highest lod's. So yes they eat ram, but they also run better than if you didn't eat ram. A lot of aspects of programming are like that. Its easier and faster to make it eat ram than to find an elegant solution to your problem. By faster I mean it actually *runs* faster. I imagine dumping all the textures into ram falls into the same paradigm.

 

Also if yer having a 9 minute quick load, yer prolly experiencing a very specific issue. The load times are acceptable for the majority of users. I think we should focus on figuring yer problem out or you should call tech support. It might be an individual bug or some random hardware setting thats conflicting with the game.

 

Post some more info and I'm sure the forum goers and Raven will take a look at yer problem and see if there are any obvious solutions, cause thats a very abnormal problem. It might actually be a legitimate code bug, in which case you can help the fellas at Raven out quite a bit by giving them a very detailed description of yer situation so they can add it to their q&a.

 

 

Lucky

 

PS: The game is obviously meant to have a long shelf life, thus the highest lod's are built for gaming rigs that haven't even been built yet. I think a lot of people are feeling afronted by the fact that the money they shelled out for the latest and greatest didn't buy them as much of a jump on the software end of their fun as they thought it would. Just relax and be happy that the game will actually start to look better as people get new computers.

[grumpycrab]

I've lost track of this thread. Can somebody summarise it (briefly!) please.

 

Is it a level LOAD or RE-LOAD problem? LOAD takes ages but then I guess it would...

 

RE-LOAD is 10-15 seconds on my 850MHz system which is fine. So what's the real problem?

[TCPVIP]

I was suffering from the long loading times myself on a somewhat beefy system (1900+, 512 DDR, ATA100 7200RPM RAID stripeset, GeFroce 3). Yesterday I switched up motherboards from a Giga-byte 7DXR to an EPoX 8KHA+. THe 7DXR is a AMD 760/ VIA 686B combo where the 8KHA+ is a VIA KT266A/ VIA 8233 combo. My 7DXR was running 512MB and the load times were up to two minutes plus. My 8KHA+ is running 256MB and my load times for a new game with the LOD cranked up is around 45 seconds, quickloads are well under ten seconds. All the hardware, minus the memory, is the same. Nothing stutters, nothing pages. The game runs and loads like a dream. It sounds to me like Raven needs to work out some incompatabilities and refine their code a tad...

[<============)=]

I've got :

 

1.6 AMD Athalon

1 Gig of RAM

GeForce 3 64MB

 

and its slow compared to an other games load times unless I lower the graphics quality.

[TCPVIP]

I just loaded JKII on my other system. This is a 1.1 Tbird, 256 SDRAM, Abit KT7 RAID, RADEON ViVo 64DDR (7200), 13gig 7200RPM ATA66. While it took a little longer to load a new game with the LOD all whe way up than my other system (see post above) it wasn't too bad. Maybe a minute for a new game and about 10 - 15 seconds for a 'quick' load. Definetly some compatability problems need to be worked out here...