Why games load so slow?

[TumbleGeorge]

Citation?

Ok, here is the comment, part of it is reason for this topic. When I read it the figures were not disputed.

 

[sLowEnd]

lol we have it good these days with blazing fast CPUs and SSDs.

Cassettes were before my time, but "slow" for me was when games had to load a bunch of stuff off CDs. (Think PS1/PS2 & early to mid 2000s games)

 

[BSim500]

DRM contribution is greatly exaggerated.

It often isn't though. From certain 'crack notes' found for Syberia 3 (Denuvo vs Denuvo removed = "Game starts up about 40s faster with D so... yeah Denuvo kills performance... especially when you are using two Denuvos in one Game"). And that's just a point & click adventure not some heavyweight AAA.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

If DRM software always slows it down that much, GOG versions would always run much better and load much faster. Do they? Not so much as to be generally talked about.

 

[BSim500]

If DRM software always slows it down that much, GOG versions would always run much better and load much faster. Do they? Not so much as to be generally talked about.

Not all DRM slows it down to the same extent (Denuvo is the worst) but I own a lot of GOG games and yes, it really is often faster to start their offline installers directly than need to start a client to do an online check to permit them to be loaded. Often it's only by a second or so, but other times, eg, if the Steam / Epic / uPlay client isn't running and it has to loaded 'cold' then logged in, etc, it can be a noticeable extra few seconds. Extreme cases it can be several hours faster (ie, those periods where Steam went down before and the game was unplayable whilst GOG users didn't even notice).

 

[TumbleGeorge]

If DRM software always slows it down that much, GOG versions would always run much better and load much faster. Do they? Not so much as to be generally talked about.

Theory and reality.

 

[Chrispy_]

Read this:

DirectStorage is coming to PC - DirectX Developer Blog

Earlier this year, Microsoft showed the world how the Xbox Series X, with its portfolio of technology innovations, will introduce a new era of no-compromise gameplay. Alongside the actual console announcements, we unveiled the Xbox Velocity Architecture, a key part of how the Xbox Series X will...

devblogs.microsoft.com

That article is from 2020.

Microsoft have fumbled DirectStorage so hard, and for so long, that it's going to be the next Duke Nukem Forever - massively overhyped and disappointing when it finally arrives.

I'm sure glad I paid for a 20-series RTX card when it launched. That promise was broken, as was the 30-series promise. I suspect the 40-series will be end-of-life before the time the first games using DirectStorage on PC are actually available to play.

 

[Chomiq]

That article is from 2020.

Microsoft have fumbled DirectStorage so hard, and for so long, that it's going to be the next Duke Nukem Forever - massively overhyped and disappointing when it finally arrives.

I'm sure glad I paid for a 20-series RTX card when it launched. That promise was broken, as was the 30-series promise. I suspect the 40-series will be end-of-life before the time the first games using DirectStorage on PC are actually available to play.

They might have fumbled it, but the OP wanted an explanation to why load times are still high(ish) on modern games. That article includes that.

 

[Morgoth]

you think these days with all those ssd's specialy big ones you could atleast put on uncompressed data on it. so it wont stress the cpu with decoding it.. and game should act prety mutch like a cartridge sness game?

 

[AusWolf]

you think these days with all those ssd's specialy big ones you could atleast put on uncompressed data on it. so it wont stress the cpu with decoding it.. and game should act prety mutch like a cartridge sness game?

Don't open than can of worms. I'm happy with my games not taking up hundreds of GB.

 

[80251]

Do some steam games load their saves from the cloud as opposed to local storage? Moving from an HDD to an SSD made no difference in loading times for save games in Dying Light only for loading the game itself.

 

[Morgoth]

Don't open than can of worms. I'm happy with my games not taking up hundreds of GB.

atleast an option while installing the game to have compressed or uncompressed data files

 

[Chomiq]

 

[80251]

@Chomiq
If you have 16 GiB or 24 GiB of on-board VRAM why would you need to stream textures in real-time? Why not just load them all when you load up a map/level?

 

[AusWolf]

@Chomiq
If you have 16 GiB or 24 GiB of on-board VRAM why would you need to stream textures in real-time? Why not just load them all when you load up a map/level?

To load fewer, but higher resolution textures on the fly, I guess?

 

[80251]

@AusWolf
But would any map/level require 16 GiB of VRAM even with high resolution textures, much less 24 GiB?

The only game I've ever seen that used nearly all the VRAM on my 1080ti was Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. The high resolution textures in that game are disgusting but maybe they would be a lot less disgusting if they weren't high resolution.

 

[AusWolf]

@AusWolf
But would any map/level require 16 GiB of VRAM even with high resolution textures, much less 24 GiB?

The only game I've ever seen that used nearly all the VRAM on my 1080ti was Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. The high resolution textures in that game are disgusting but maybe they would be a lot less disgusting if they weren't high resolution.

For now, games don't use so much VRAM because they don't use DirectStorage, either. I'm not saying that they should, but they could.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

in fact, the games do not load all the information, because in addition to the main scene, in the development of the game, there are cutscenes in the scene with playing animation. Often animation with a high level of realism and resolution, which has a serious volume in a decompressed form. It should not be forgotten that games are made to be accessible. And mainstream video cards still have around 6-8GB of video memory, and that too recently. Apparently, the games do not have enough artificial intelligence to use the amount of graphics memory as well as possible. And the scene/level load time would get a bit longer if loading in advance all the animations even if there is enough video memory to accommodate them.

 

[Mussels]

have quoted what I have read.

what you quoted is a tiny part of a larger conversation missing any and all context
Games load they way they do, because they're coded they way they are.



Compression slows down a system with a slow CPU, but not one with a fast CPU.
No or poor compression slows down a system with slow storage, even with a fast CPU.


As far as deaths and respawns, some games reload you into an existing world as is, others need to reload everything - it's all down to how they're programmed


Starcraft II has fast load times on modern hardware, but you gotta load the launcher, the games main menu, the campaign menu, the specific campaigns menu, that campaigns missions pre-game area, THEN the actual mission
The reason thats slow? dumb dev ideas.

I've never understood why that happens. The game assets are already in your RAM, so all you need is to go back to your position a couple seconds earlier. Why does that have to take an eternity?

because things are ran in the game based on triggers, and those triggers cannot be reset - so they have to create the entire environment from scratch to prevent a non-reset trigger breaking things.

An enemy who died may not respawn making an area non-progressable, or an area you pass may no longer trigger a cutscene because that's already happened
It's done that way to save on resources and debugging - if it's a clean slate every time, you get the same results every time

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Now we may have come to the conclusion that the games initially after launch and subsequently the various levels load slowly for many reasons and this is the reason why we cannot see the expected load acceleration just by replacing the data storage device with one that reads the data faster than the already available older device

 

[AsRock]

Denuvo is shown to increase game and level loading times:

By 40-60% though? No in the vast majority of cases, it's often in the 10-20% range.

Shader caching should only happen on the first load. Worst case, the game caches while running but it still only needs to do so once.

What causes long loading times varies a lot depending on the size and amount of the game assets, how those assets are stored, how well optimized the loading routine is, and how much work the game needs to do to get the game world running.



DRM like Denuvo bloats the EXE file size and it always running in the background. This is why the same game with Denuvo runs worse then without. DRM that only looks for a simple activation token at launch are easily crack-able.

HAHA, even with DRM like Denuvo they are normally cracked in hours or at least a week typically. In the end the buyer just pays for the crap in more than one.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Talking about cracking is illegal and I think that haven't place here.

 

[AusWolf]

because things are ran in the game based on triggers, and those triggers cannot be reset - so they have to create the entire environment from scratch to prevent a non-reset trigger breaking things.

An enemy who died may not respawn making an area non-progressable, or an area you pass may no longer trigger a cutscene because that's already happened
It's done that way to save on resources and debugging - if it's a clean slate every time, you get the same results every time

That makes sense, thanks.

 

[lightning70]

I install heavy and multi-file games on SSD and the loading time is getting pretty short. For example AC Odyssey.

 

[Vayra86]

Now we may have come to the conclusion that the games initially after launch and subsequently the various levels load slowly for many reasons and this is the reason why we cannot see the expected load acceleration just by replacing the data storage device with one that reads the data faster than the already available older device

Loading is also building.

Loading the data into active memory is one thing, but another is placing all those assets on the map, creating the scene basically. And after that most engines pick that up 'on the fly'. Depending on the engine you can often see that happening; Unreal Engine is notorious for giving you low res texturing if its not done in time, to maintain FPS. In Far Cry, you can see the little black squares when it builds assets or increases the LoD on objects. This is also where pop-in occurs, and many other undesirable effects.