Loading times! This is becoming the single biggest hindrance to enjoyment of game.

[Iankas]

Man, I wish people would stop bleating "SSD SSD SSD"  as if it were a panacea to loading times problem.

Also it is kinda pointless to point out that you have a fast loading time when you have an i5 Ivy Bridge with 16 gig RAM and RAID 0 SSDs. That's like twice the computing power of the recommended spec.

Simply irrelevant.

 

Now as for myself, I have a Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD and loading time is somewhat annoying (15 - 20 seconds).

The SSD has a high burst of activity in the couple of seconds but after that the loading time is gated by my weak CPU (AMD A8-7600). It seems PoE only able to use up to 2 cores. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be improved by patches.

 

I think an option to load all the smaller areas in the main map i.e. load all the indoors area would be useful. For some people it is better to wait one full minute and then be able play uninterrupted for 5+ minutes. Right now doing some missions in town or doing stuff in the Stronghold means a multitude of 20 seconds of gameplay followed by 20 seconds of loading screen.

[sparklecat]

Was these loading times always present from the first time you guys played?

Nope.  Started off fast, got slower with time, improved a bit with 1.03, then got bad again.

[Idleray]

Does anyone here having this issue (and is on the latest version of the game [1.03]) mind posting save games for us to look into?

 

I'm trying attach a save but its 2MB and the max upload size is 1MB. Can I email it to you? I can't find an address in your profile

[Katarack21]

I've had exactly the same experience as sparklecat. Started fine, got slow, improved slightly, got slow again. I have an SSD and plenty of RAM. My CPU is a little slow--it's a Core 2 Duo 2.13 Ghz--but the game doesn't suffer any major slowdowns or issues outside of save/load times.

[sparklecat]

Core i3-370M 2.4 GHz, HDD, and 4 GB RAM here; it's not an amazing machine, sure, but this seems to be a pretty broad issue regardless.

 

Only other performance-related problem I've had is one fight where the number of spell effects going off at once turned it into a laggy unplayable mess.

[luzarius]

I didn't know the game had loading times, then again I have a job and upgrade my PC on a regular basis.

[Justinian]

Perhaps related - is anyone getting worse performance the longer the game runs?

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/73539-performance-drop-after-a-few-map-transitions/

[broknight]

loading between screens is a pain indeed.

[Katarack21]

Perhaps related - is anyone getting worse performance the longer the game runs?

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/73539-performance-drop-after-a-few-map-transitions/

My 21 second load times was with a fresh opening of the game.

[Justinian]

No, I mean with actual game performance. The longer you play in a session the lower the framerate goes. Really annoying since after a while, even perfectly smooth areas become stuttery.

[archangel979]

I didn't know the game had loading times, then again I have a job and upgrade my PC on a regular basis.

Are these kind of comments really needed?

Some people have families to support and some don't live in rich countries. And some both.

[sparklecat]

No, I mean with actual game performance. The longer you play in a session the lower the framerate goes. Really annoying since after a while, even perfectly smooth areas become stuttery.

Huh.  Nope.  I haven't played any sessions for more than a couple hours since the first weekend it was out, but this has never struck me.

[HozzM]

I think the load times, between areas, are pretty bad. I have a 1TB 840 EVO, so I don't think its my system.

 

I can't say I have noticed load times getting longer but the amount of time it takes to complete a quick save definitely is.

[ibanix]

No, I mean with actual game performance. The longer you play in a session the lower the framerate goes. Really annoying since after a while, even perfectly smooth areas become stuttery.

 

Yes, I've noticed this too. After a few hours I start to get audio stutter, particularly on NPC banter.

[Horrorscope]

I didn't know the game had loading times, then again I have a job and upgrade my PC on a regular basis.

 

Right and the designers of the game are releasing another patch, which will be the second time they've acknowledged there are some issue with save/load.

 

Congrats on having a job, myself, Im an owner and just buy 5k alienware systems and dispose of them after a month because I feel my registry isn't as primo as it should be. Que internet Alienware hate, in 3...2...1...

 

*I kid, I really just have a job to, pc's are clean and have save/loads that I feel could be faster.

[daffodilistic]

Here's my savegame with my 21 second loading times.

 

http://www.filedropper.com/d6658afce3684a6a92f4cb04b398032519461609blackmeadow

 

 

At present I'm looking at about 90s to load up my game initially, 30s to transition areas, and 45s to load my quicksave in game.  Here are my saves (the last one's experiencing some quest-related problems, incidentally, so I don't know if that'll affect anything you're looking into): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw56i-bKiIvXeXdBbEpuWk03UmM/view?usp=sharing

 

Hey guys, I tried to load both your games, and they load pretty quick on my system - 6 seconds for Katarack21's save game, and sparklecat's loads in 12.

 

Caveat: I use an SSD, and I play on a Windows machine on an i7 with a recent mid-range NVIDIA graphic card. Hope that helps.

[Duchess of Kvetch]

It hasn't gotten onerous enough to be an issue on my end - have a fairly recent gaming laptop, but it's NOT installed on an SSD either.

 

However, the larger my save file, the longer the loads and saves - and since they're zipped files, that makes some sense. I suspect that due to the archiving, having a heavily fragmented drive will just exacerbate things for some people.

 

As for the why's of the file bloat - it looks mostly like that mobile objects file. The same one that got "fixed" earlier due to storing unneeded data.

Edited April 13, 2015 by Duchess of Kvetch

[Lord Wafflebum]

I didn't know the game had loading times, then again I have a job and upgrade my PC on a regular basis.

Ow. The edge...

[Exyll]

somewhere around level 4/starting Act II is when I start noticing it - my F5s, they start taking longer and longer to respond

[ioci]

when i have a loading time issue, i tab out to browse this forum, it helps me a little on killing time

[Badmojo]

The loading times are ridiculous and the game is not optimized at all.  Why are some of the small areas not all combined on a single map with boundaries to keep it separate (looking at you stronghold!)?  Also, why can't we have multiple maps (that are near each other) loaded up at once?  When you transition you just switch maps inside the ram instead of loading and unloading the areas.  This game requires a lot of transition screens and this is not even including the oh, so wonderful (/s) rest mechanic that makes you have to trek back eventually to restock tent supplies or rest.

[Namutree]

The loading times are ridiculous and the game is not optimized at all.  Why are some of the small areas not all combined on a single map with boundaries to keep it separate (looking at you stronghold!)?  Also, why can't we have multiple maps (that are near each other) loaded up at once?  When you transition you just switch maps inside the ram instead of loading and unloading the areas.  This game requires a lot of transition screens and this is not even including the oh, so wonderful (/s) rest mechanic that makes you have to trek back eventually to restock tent supplies or rest.

If that could be done for the stronghold I would be so grateful to Obsidian.

 

 

I want PoE to speed up. If only there was some way to make it run faster. If anyone has any idea of what some one can do to make PoE run faster; please let me know.

[Philomorph]

Just for reference, my minimum transition time is about 6 seconds, and that's walking into a basically empty building with non-conversationl NPCs like the Mill in Dyreford Village. For comparison it takes about 12 seconds to load the village when I exit the mill. This is AFTER applying the no auto-save mod, which did speed things up a bit (but not much).

 

I'm running it off a fast SSD on an i7 mobile CPU with 8GB RAM. So, not the fastest on the market, but no slouch IMO.

 

I also wish the transition times were faster, especially in towns where I might go in and out of buildings frequently. I really wish they hadn't divided every building into a separate load. It seems unnecessary on modern systems. I've been playing for an hour and PoE is only using 1.4GB of memory. Come on, fill up that RAM guys! I bought it for a reason.

[Duchess of Kvetch]

We seem to be talking about 2 different things here... map transition times, and the save/load times from disk. I haven't noticed an increase in map transitions, just file access times.

 

The map style, regardless of inefficiency, is directly based off of Baldur's Gate maps - they were going for nostalgia over performance. Back then we had even longer load times, but were running off Ye Olde Pentiums and took what we could get. ;-)

 

As for the 1.4Gb memory usage, be glad for it. Your computer doesn't use all its active RAM anyway, and needs a lot of "swap space' as the OS runs a ton of backend processes, and most of us also are running a browser and other utility apps we can easily alt-tab to (the game seems very stable in this regard, thankfully). 

[Althernai]

We seem to be talking about 2 different things here... map transition times, and the save/load times from disk. I haven't noticed an increase in map transitions, just file access times.

They're not entirely independent. The game performs an auto-save on every area transition which contributes to the area loading times. I'm pretty sure that the auto-save is what is causing the increase in transition times.

 

The map style, regardless of inefficiency, is directly based off of Baldur's Gate maps - they were going for nostalgia over performance. Back then we had even longer load times, but were running off Ye Olde Pentiums and took what we could get. ;-)

But that's just the thing: it doesn't work like Baldur's Gate did. In the old games, the area loading times were dominated by reading the area from disk. That means that when you were going to a small area (like a house), it only took a short time. In PoE, I don't know what is dominating the loading times: it's definitely not disk (or people with SSDs wouldn't be getting much slower times than those with HDDs) and it's probably not CPU (I tried letting mine overclock itself and it makes practically no difference). Every area in the game takes roughly the same amount of time. It wouldn't be so bad, but the game is obviously not designed around this -- there are quests which amount to you running from the second floor of a house (two area transitions) to a house in another part of the city (two more) and then back (so 8 total). It really breaks the flow of the game.