2-5 minutes to load game

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Buc Denizen, Nov 1, 2018.

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  1. Buc Denizen

    Buc Denizen Avatar

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    Was looking for an MMO for my sons (5 and 11) and I to play together, and Shroud seemed like a great one for team/co-op type play. Got it installed on all three machines and so far it's been fun but the load time to start the game is extreme on two of the computers. On the 5-year old's $450 Lenovo, it loads just fine. However on the two halfway-decent machines that we normally game on, it can be up to five minutes to load the game. The 2 or 3 minutes of "Equipping avatars" has made for some good joking around, but after only a couple days of this, the kids rather play something else.

    I've tried dropping the settings down to "Fast" on the two machines but still the same thing. Below are the system specs for the two PCs having the trouble. Any help would be greatly appreciated.



    ------------------
    System Information
    ------------------
    Time of this report: 11/1/2018, 06:47:08
    Machine name:
    Machine Id:
    Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 17763) (17763.rs5_release.180914-1434)
    Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
    System Manufacturer: Acer
    System Model: Predator G3-605
    BIOS: P11-C1 (type: UEFI)
    Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
    Memory: 16384MB RAM
    Available OS Memory: 16304MB RAM
    Page File: 15733MB used, 16455MB available
    Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 12
    DX Setup Parameters: Not found
    User DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
    System DPI Setting: 144 DPI (150 percent)
    DWM DPI Scaling: Disabled
    Miracast: Available, with HDCP
    Microsoft Graphics Hybrid: Not Supported
    DxDiag Version: 10.00.17763.0001 64bit Unicode


    ---------------
    Display Devices
    ---------------
    Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950
    Manufacturer: NVIDIA
    Chip type: GeForce GTX 950
    DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
    Device Type: Full Device (POST)
    Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1402&SUBSYS_8C921462&REV_A1
    Device Status: 0180200A [DN_DRIVER_LOADED|DN_STARTED|DN_DISABLEABLE|DN_NT_ENUMERATOR|DN_NT_DRIVER]
    Device Problem Code: No Problem
    Driver Problem Code: Unknown
    Display Memory: 10159 MB
    Dedicated Memory: 2007 MB
    Shared Memory: 8151 MB
    Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (60Hz)


    =================================================================================================

    System Information
    ------------------
    Time of this report: 11/1/2018, 06:42:04
    Machine name:
    Machine Id:
    Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 17134) (17134.rs4_release.180410-1804)
    Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
    System Manufacturer: MSI
    System Model: MS-7641
    BIOS: V25.1 (type: UEFI)
    Processor: AMD FX(tm)-4300 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.8GHz
    Memory: 8192MB RAM
    Available OS Memory: 8186MB RAM
    Page File: 6094MB used, 11274MB available
    Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 12
    DX Setup Parameters: Not found
    User DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
    System DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
    DWM DPI Scaling: Disabled
    Miracast: Available, with HDCP
    Microsoft Graphics Hybrid: Not Supported
    DxDiag Version: 10.00.17134.0001 64bit Unicode



    ---------------
    Display Devices
    ---------------
    Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050
    Manufacturer: NVIDIA
    Chip type: GeForce GTX 1050
    DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
    Device Type: Full Device (POST)
    Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1C81&SUBSYS_11C0196E&REV_A1
    Device Status: 0180200A [DN_DRIVER_LOADED|DN_STARTED|DN_DISABLEABLE|DN_NT_ENUMERATOR|DN_NT_DRIVER]
    Device Problem Code: No Problem
    Driver Problem Code: Unknown
    Display Memory: 6080 MB
    Dedicated Memory: 1987 MB
    Shared Memory: 4092 MB
    Current Mode: 1680 x 1050 (32 bit) (59Hz)
     
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  2. Feeyo

    Feeyo Avatar

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    I would recommend playing Trove and or MapleStory 2 with your kids.
     
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  3. Scanphor

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    Your specs don't say whether these PCs have solid state drives (SSDs) - I suspect not. This game really needs SSDs for loading performance (as do an increasing number of games these days). Switching to an SSD is probably the single biggest upgrade you can carry out to boost the performance of a PC that doesn't have one.
     
  4. Daxxe Diggler

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    I agree. Along with that, your next biggest improvement would be to get at least 16 GB of RAM for each PC.
     
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  5. Jason_M

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    Hello @Buc Denizen and welcome to New Britannia!

    Firstly, your machines look pretty capable! Having the game installed on an SSD, as mentioned, helps a lot. 16GB of RAM isn't strictly needed, but I can tell you from experience that it decreases loading times a fair bit.

    Loading times are a factor of CPU speed (you look good for that), having adequate RAM (one machine is great, the other on the border), and the other two factors are unknown for your systems: storage drive speed and internet connection.

    5 minute loading time is pretty excessive! You might need to do some maintenance/cleaning on the software end of things to ensure your system resources are properly dedicated to tje game client and not something in the background.

    Please keep us updated on your progress.
     
  6. Parson Barr

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    Honestly I've noticed an increase in my load times, even as I see improvement in hitching. For a while load times were fabulous, but something is stalling scene loads for me. I haven't reported it because I haven't studied it enough yet to see where it happens.
     
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  7. LiquidBlaze

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    You can't just say SSD anymore, Lotta old slow SSD's. What you really want to say is M2 SSD, and even further Samsung Evo level. Shroud will load fast then. (so will everything else) Using a drive like this, your swap file becomes quite fast, Just like having lots of ram. The disconnect I find is the lack of understanding of how far certain techs that usually dont have such a large difference when upgrading have come in such a recent short time, While our cpus remain sort of a"linear" progression ram and gpu's have made quite the leaps, To fully understand for instance, I would do a quick benchmark comparison on your drive now and a m2 evo just to get a idea of the gap, then do the same with that 950 and a 2080. Not the usual "steps" we are used to as consumers, some "leaps" are in there. But... this is just my take on things. Then again, what does a Liquid know? =) (saving time, diff in that 950 vs 2080 is nearly 500%) oO imagine the drive...
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2018
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  8. Scanphor

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    Yes and no ;-)

    Whilst true that a good NVMe SSD (I use an EVO 960 myself and it is indeed very speedy :) ) will outperform a SATA SSD, being able to install such in a system relies on either having a motherboard with an M2 slot or use of PCI-e adapter cards, which is not always possible. And as you correctly say a good M2 SSD such as the Samsung EVO significantly outperforms some of the cheaper M2 format ones which have performance no better than most SATA SSDs, so just saying "an M2 SSD" isn't enough.

    In any event, the jump in subjective real world performance from mechanical HDD to SATA SSD is still much greater than the jump from SATA SSD to NVMe SSD. Which given that its usually both cheaper and easier to do the former means that the existence of the newer drive types in no way invalidates the SATA drives as an easy, cheap and significant upgrade path.

    Then of course, there's the new larger capacity Intel Optane drives - not as high on the fairly synthetic sequential read stats, but much quicker in terms of random small reads (and hence in many real world situations) - but they are just too expensive to justify for most people or situations.
     
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  9. Sentinel2

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    I had similar problems with playing Shroud. Had a 7200 RPM drive for years. I upgraded earlier this year to an SSD drive. The performance improvement was staggering. For everything. Not just the game.

    I'm a big fan of SANDisk SSD drives. Amazon.com has the 480 Gig model fairly cheap. Occasionally the 1TB SANDisk drive goes on sale for about $100. They might not be the best in the market however they are respectable in performance.

    I'd recommend replacing the drive. I tried sticking with the spinny drive however I just couldn't deal with the load times myself. Moving forward, I'm building all my new systems with SSD drives. It's that dramatic of a difference. And worth it.
     
  10. fragmeister13

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    On the other end of the spectrum I'm still using a magnetic drive but I did upgrade to 16GB of RAM a while back and my load times are about 1 minute or less at the most.
     
  11. Eric White

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    SSD is huge.

    But another thing I think people overlook is a quality motherboard. Your average run of the mill $100-120 mobo even with the same chipset on it, is not going to compete with something like a ASUS ROG mobo... high quality components make a huge difference in mobo because it binds all the pieces of a PC together.
     
  12. Elwyn

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    First system looks okay, second system could use a little more RAM, both might could use SSD. It should be enough to just set up the SSD as D:, then re-install it in D:\Program Files\ . I did that on one computer I had, except that I set up a symbolic link from C:\Program Files\ so that I wouldn't have to reinstall. The first load of any scene is going to take longer than successive loads if you have enough RAM. Scene loading time is also more a function of what's inside it rather than your video card. Town scenes are going to take longer to load because player housing is changeable so it can't be optimized like in a single-player game.
     
  13. smack

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    Perhaps the devs need to take another look at initial load times as a higher priority and fix on their end? I have a high end PC with NVMe SSDs and a gigabit connection and the initial load time could still use some further optimization.
     
  14. Scanphor

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    That's a good very easy option - to really speed up your PC generally though you need to migrate your OS (C) drive to the SSD. This can be done fairly easily without a full reinstall - which I've done many times without issue for people to revitalise older laptops etc. Several SSD manufacturers provide migration software that automates this process - I usually do it using the free version of EaseUS ToDo backup.
     
  15. Yolo SoLive

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    I'll second the ssd option- upgraded my laptop,and it was like a brand new laptop. It the least expensive way to upgrade and get a great return.
     
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  16. majoria70

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    Also as I've witnessed before some younger kids lose interest fast in a sandbox world that takes imagination and can be complicated to forge their way verses repetitive fast paced challenges such as Mario and Zelda type games but I don't know your kids. That has just been my experience showing off the game to them. It's great that you choose to play games with them. I wish you lots of wonderful moments. :)
     
  17. Buc Denizen

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    Will definitely look into SSD drives, but I think there's more to it than that. I clicked Play Online on my 5-year old's computer. I am now typing this and will cut n paste his DXDiag:

    ------------------
    System Information
    ------------------
    Time of this report: 11/1/2018, 14:56:04
    Machine name:
    Machine Id:
    Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 17134) (17134.rs4_release.180410-1804)
    Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
    System Manufacturer: LENOVO
    System Model: 90BG003JUS
    BIOS: IRKT58AUS (type: UEFI)
    Processor: AMD A10-7800 Radeon R7, 12 Compute Cores 4C+8G (4 CPUs), ~3.5GHz
    Memory: 12288MB RAM
    Available OS Memory: 11212MB RAM
    Page File: 4823MB used, 9145MB available
    Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 12
    DX Setup Parameters: Not found
    User DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
    System DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
    DWM DPI Scaling: Disabled
    Miracast: Available, with HDCP
    Microsoft Graphics Hybrid: Not Supported
    DxDiag Version: 10.00.17134.0001 64bit Unicode


    ---------------
    Display Devices
    ---------------
    Card name: AMD Radeon(TM) R7 Graphics
    Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
    Chip type: AMD Radeon Graphics Processor (0x130F)
    DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
    Device Type: Full Device (POST)
    Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_130F&SUBSYS_36A017AA&REV_00
    Device Status: 0180200A [DN_DRIVER_LOADED|DN_STARTED|DN_DISABLEABLE|DN_NT_ENUMERATOR|DN_NT_DRIVER]
    Device Problem Code: No Problem
    Driver Problem Code: Unknown
    Display Memory: 6597 MB
    Dedicated Memory: 991 MB
    Shared Memory: 5605 MB
    Current Mode: 1360 x 768 (32 bit) (60Hz)



    And then I edited out the computer name and driver section and in this amount of time, his character is now in game. $450 computer with onboard vid card and a 7200 SATA2 drive.

    I'm just not buying the 5-min load time on my other computers is because of slow drives or lack of optimization, although I realize RAM and drive upgrades could help make this game perform a little better. There's something else to it.
     
  18. sake888

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    No way should it take that long with specs like that. Your computers are fine, it's the code that needs attention.
     
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  19. Scanphor

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    If you've not owned a PC with SSDs before I think you'll be surprised just how big an upgrade they are ;)

    Only other thing to try in the meantime I can think of is make sure the game installation location is on your antivirus excluded locations list.
     
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  20. Buc Denizen

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    Very familiar with the benefits of SSD. If a generic PC wasn't clearly indicating that isn't the issue, I'd probably order a pair tonight.
     
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