Total Warhammer 2 Long Load Times _VERIFIED_

Now that Grand Theft Auto Online's load times have been reduced (opens in new tab), let's figure out which game is still making us stare at the same how-to-play tips for too long. Is it Civilization 6, Fallout 4, or any of the recent Total War games? Is it your own super heavily modded version of Minecraft or Skyrim? Or is it that one game you installed to an HDD by accident?

Robin Valentine: Total War: Warhammer. If you haven't got an SSD with loads of free space on it, you'll be waiting a long time for your orcs and dwarfs. On my sadly outdated PC, it takes so long to load up each battle that I could probably paint up two actual Warhammer armies and play with those instead. The developer's done great work over time cutting down both load times and the wait for AI empires to play out their turns, but on my hardware it's still a slog getting through a campaign.

Natalie Clayton: I don't think Half-Life 2's loading times are bad, per se. But I remember playing through it the first time 'round on an ageing laptop with a bad hard drive, and the way that game's sudden, supposedly "seamless" level transitions ground the game to a halt drove me up the wall. You'd open a door, walk down a corridor, or turn a corner, and bam. The screen freezes and I'm sat waiting for the action to resume for a minute or two.

Jody Macgregor: The Sims 2 predates multiple-core CPUs and hyperthreading, so it doesn't seem to run any faster on a modern rig than it did back in the day. If you've got the Ultimate Collection with all the DLC, that adds to the load times, as do mods. Not to mention save file bloat, which means the longer you've been playing a save the longer the wait gets. If you chug the Elixir of Life, sims can keep on keeping on for a good long while. Even without that, or a 10GB custom content folder, this damn game from 2004 takes longer to get going than anything else I own.

Morgan Park: Most VR games. I've been playing every great VR game I can get my hands on over the past few weeks and I'm still not used to the long load times. As Nat mentioned above about Half-Life, the abrupt loading halts really suck in Half-Life: Alyx. Maybe it's a quirk of the Source engine that it can't shake, but I'd rather sit through Portal's telegraphed loading elevators than suddenly cut to a load in a hallway. Valve isn't the only culprit: Boneworks is a lovely physics sandbox that makes you sit through two long loads just to continue from your checkpoint. It wouldn't be so bad except that, in VR, I'm trapped in a grey void with nothing to do during loads. I can't just scroll Twitter for 60-90 seconds like I'm used to.

OsaX Nymloth: First Witcher, before the Enhanced Edition. I actually didn't finish it because of these ultra long loading times. You could go and make yourself a tea or get a snack everytime you had to switch locations. And you had to switch locations a lot. I gave up on the swamps at some point. Vision of Geralt running to the city and back to the swamp AGAIN was too much to handle.

mainer: Fallout 4. I just stated playing again this week, and granted, I have modded it pretty heavily, but the loading screens when going from an exterior cell to interior cell, or interior to exterior, can be just be extremely long. Even with an RTX 3080, Samsung SSD, and a liquid cooled I9-9900K, i can still experience a load screen that's in excess of 1 minute, and that can really just kill the game flow. It doesn't happen with every load screen, but often enough to be a pain.

I don't remember if I've played any games with long loading times during gameplay. Maybe the Mass Effect elevator rides, but that didn't happen all that often and it wasn't that much worse from some other games, that's just how it was before SSDs.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame."}; var triggerHydrate = function() { window.sliceComponents.authorBio.hydrate(data, componentContainer); } var triggerScriptLoadThenHydrate = function() { var script = document.createElement('script'); script.src = ' -8-2/authorBio.js'; script.async = true; script.id = 'vanilla-slice-authorBio-component-script'; script.onload = () => { window.sliceComponents.authorBio = authorBio; triggerHydrate(); }; document.head.append(script); } if (window.lazyObserveElement) { window.lazyObserveElement(componentContainer, triggerScriptLoadThenHydrate); } else { triggerHydrate(); } } }).catch(err => console.log('Hydration Script has failed for authorBio Slice', err)); }).catch(err => console.log('Externals script failed to load', err));Jody MacgregorSocial Links NavigationWeekend/AU EditorJody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games (opens in new tab). He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun (opens in new tab), The Big Issue, GamesRadar (opens in new tab), Zam (opens in new tab), Glixel (opens in new tab), Five Out of Ten Magazine (opens in new tab), and Playboy.com (opens in new tab), whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

A hacker going by the handle T0st says he has figured out a core issue that caused longer-than-necessary load times in Grand Theft Auto Online for years. The hacker has released a proof of concept DLL fix that shortens those lengthy startup times by roughly 70 percent.

That's not a scientific survey or anything, but even accounting for self-selection and reporting issues, those load times are very long, especially for such an old game. The problem is even harder to understand when the single-player Grand Theft Auto V tends to load many times faster.

To get to the bottom of the problem, T0st writes that they started by profiling their own CPU to try to figure out why the game was maxing out a single CPU thread for over four minutes during loading. After using a tool to dump the process stack and disassembling the GTA code as it was running in memory, T0st noticed a set of (somewhat obfuscated) functions that seemed to be parsing a 10MB JSON file with over 63,000 total entries.

For one, the specific function used to parse the JSON string (seemingly sscanf, in this case) was apparently running a time-intensive strlen checking function repeatedly after the read for every single piece of data. Simply caching that string length value to speed up those checks resulted in an over 50 percent reduction in load times on its own, T0st writes.

Relax! You'll learn the easy and helpful methods to fix Windows 10/8/7 games that take too long to load and start. This post will be divided into two parts. First, troubleshoot the "computer slow to open games" issue and then speed up your computer in every way.

It is indeed very frustrating when you try to open your games or other programs, and the computer takes a very long time to load them. The first thing you can do is to close all programs running in the background.

If you want quicker load times, investing in an SSD is a good option. Not only will it improve game loading times, but it'll also make your computer generally much snappier, and make your boot times crazy fast (compared with an HDD) if you use it as your boot drive. But how to clone HDD to SSD without reinstalling programs or Windows OS? EaseUS Partition Master provides the simplest solutions.

Some of the questions we plan to answer today include: what sort of storage device do you need to play today's games? Specifically, what sort of drive provides the best loading times, so you're not sitting around and waiting ages to get into gaming. Part of this answer is obvious, SSDs are faster than hard drives, so we want to dial down a bit and see what sort of SSD is required. Do you need a PCIe drive? Do you need something with a DRAM cache? Are certain memory technologies worse than others?

We'll be loading up a variety of games, and timing how long it takes to get into a playable level from the main screen. Loading screens are the primary thing impacted by storage performance in games, everyone wants to get in and play games immediately, so we'll be testing that across a selection of different titles.

The slowest SATA drive, the Samsung 870 QVO, offered a 73% speedup to load times versus the hard drive, so it's clear that having an SSD is important. But beyond that, there's just a 36% improvement moving from the slowest to fastest SSD tested.

However, it's clearly better to have at least some form for SSD for loading Tomb Raider. Loading from a hard drive was more than twice as slow, and while overall load times aren't terrible on a hard drive, a simple speedup from an SSD is worthwhile. 2b1af7f3a8