[Resolved in TDM 2.10] Why does an FM take so long to load - not a complaint really

[Oldjim]

Purely out of interest I decided to run the resource monitor while loading an FM and found that the limiting factor is my CPU which hits about 85% to 90% for the duration (about 45 secs)

I know that I have a low powered processor E6750 core 2 duo but I am surprised that it takes that long when other games are much quicker

Is this normal and would a much faster processor speed it up a lot

[SteveL]

No idea how hardware-dependent the load times are. I have a faster processor and a 4gb graphics card but I get slower load times than that on big maps.

 

99% of the time after the loading bar finishes but before the map is playable is spent in an engine routine that looks like it's preprocessing textures: idImage::ActuallyLoadImage(). Most of that time is spent calling some openGL routine in the graphics card driver, in my case atioglxx.dll. The routine is:

qglTexImage2D( GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, internalFormat, scaled_width, scaled_height, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, scaledBuffer );

 

I don't know what the driver's doing. I was curious about the same question yesterday and I got the above details from visual studio profiler, but I don't know anything about graphics drivers so the above is as much info as I got from the exercise.

[Bikerdude]

@OJ, whats are you full system specs and how much disposable cash do you have atm, the reason I am asking will become clear..

[Oldjim]

The system spec is such that I would need to replace everything except the graphics card to get a significant increase

The only cheap upgrade is to change from a Core 2 duo to a core 2 quad other than that it would mean a new motherboard, memory (present memory isn't compatible with a new MB) and CPU

The core 2 quad would give me about 90% better multi-threaded performance and cost about £70 for a Q9550 or a Q6600 for about £30 would give about 70% better performance

Actual system spec

Motherboard Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4

CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E6750

Memory 4GB DDR2

Graphics card Nvidia 650Ti 1GB memory

 

Actually with my screen resolution 1680 x 1050 I don't have many problems

Thief 4 works in 32 bit mode but I won't be playing that again as it is boring

Far Cry 3, Dishonored, Crysis etc.all run OK

I did seriously consider upgrading to a quad processor for Thief 4 but I am glad I didn't

 

I probably won't do anything until I have to as I can get a new M/B, i5 CPU, and 8GB Ram for under £300 (CPU prices have dropped as lot since I last looked)

Edited June 6, 2014 by Oldjim

[lost_soul]

Be aware that RAM is extremely expensive right now.

[demagogue]

It won't be much consolation, but it used to take even longer.

They did some optimizations (like culling out redundant data) a few versions ago that made it load faster now.

But yeah, it's still slow.

 

I remember reading about other optimizations that are possible, but they'd compromise the game or break old maps or something like that, so couldn't be done.

 

The only bright side is that once the map is loaded in, restarting or reloading is a snap.

[HMart]

AFAIK other games are faster at loading time because they use streaming to fetch stuff from the HDD at run time, but imo they become limited when you need to reload the game fast, for example when dying, idtech4 instead puts the entire level on memory so it takes time to load at first but when you die it reloads almost instantly.

[Oldjim]

Be aware that RAM is extremely expensive right now.

That is a surprise as I can get 8GB DDR3 dual channel Corsair for about £65 which I didn't think was too bad Edited June 7, 2014 by Oldjim

[Briareos H]

As far as we've discussed in an other recent thread, the longer part of the loading sequence does indeed involve the CPU over anything else: loading from disk to memory and from memory to VRAM is pretty fast on most systems. But besides that, the game does a lot of calculations (I'd guess texture decompression, loading and setting up the script engine and entities, pre-calculating other stuff?) which, AFAIK, are not threaded. Which means that to improve these loading times, you'll need faster CPU cores: going from dual core to quad core shouldn't change much, instead try to get a higher-clocked (or overclocked) CPU.

 

Nevermind that. Hadn't seen SteveL's post, which instantly reminded me that on my ATI card that part of the loading had once improved tremendously by switching to a different driver release -- that unfortunately completely botched the rendering. So maybe it's some sort of long, unoptimized loop of calculations between the game thread and GPU driver. I wonder if something could be done to help with that.

Edited June 7, 2014 by Briareos H

[Bikerdude]

I probably won't do anything until I have to as I can get a new M/B, i5 CPU, and 8GB Ram for under £300 (CPU prices have dropped as lot since I last looked)

You could also consider getting an SSD now and this will improve overall system performance.

[Oldjim]

I looked into that but from the system monitor that doesn't appear to be the bottleneck as the peak transfer speed during the loading is well below the maximum it can achieve

The only real advantage of an SSD would be for the Windows 100GB boot partition but as I very rarely reboot the computer that isn't a concern and the programs which are on that partition all run quickly

Note that all my games are on a totally separate drive