I find that the actual loading times, while the are long, they are made much longer when they add on the constant autosave after the each load. I forced to save on the way in and on the way out and if I forget something I save all over again when I go back in. If I saved that often I would never find time to finish the game, what were they thinking? :
Intel Q6600Gigabyte P35 DQ6 sys brd4 Gb ddr2 ramX-Fi Fatality PlatinumVista 64bit Ultimate2 x Radeon 2900xt video cardsAll drivers and such are current and the game is patched to 1.1a and drive has been defragged, etc.When loading between different major areas of the game like going from the starting keeps courtyard to the interior and reverse and leaving the keep and going onto the first town, my system takes 5-10 minutes to load these areas up. When I'm in the initial keep, it can take upwards 1 minute to load the individual rooms up.The fighting and moving about in an area is smooth. It is just the transitioning from one area to another the kind of sucks on my machine. I've even tried changing the processor affinity from all 4 cores down to two and even 1 and that has made no difference in load times.I've even uninstalled/reinstalled the game. I installed this on the other system that is in my house, which has similar specs. It has a good C2D instead of a quad processor and an Nvidia 8800gtx instead for graphics. OS is Vista 64 bit home premium instead of ultimate also.The Witcher has normal load times on that machine. Like 15-20 seconds max. Problem is, it isn't mine so I can't use it. No other current game is having problems running on my computer. Oblivion, Bioshock, LOTRO, Hellgate London, Two Worlds, Gothic 3. NWN2 ran without any kind of a hiccup. And these are with every setting maxxed. I've had crossfire enabled/disabled. I've turned off my anti-virus. I don't overclock or use drive emulation software. I don't know what it is, but this game definitely doesn't agree with something on my computer. I’ve even tried the game with every setting on minimal. Frustrated.
One problem is how long the 'Load' screen takes to appear when you want to load a savegame. This gets very bad indeed as the game progresses and the number of saves climbs.Could we not reuse a few 'slots' for quicksaves, rather than creating a new save file for every one? This will keep that screen usable without deleting things through Windows Explorer, and manual saves could still be done if wanted.Also, could you please not deactivate Quickload when Geralt is dead? This is when people want to quickload...
Stopwatched my load times if you guys are interested. (These load times are based in areas of the 1st and 2nd chapters - going in and out of houses etc)XP Pro, Pentium 4 3.4ghz, 250HD, Ati X1650X 256 GPU, 1G RamOn average, to load a level it takes my machine anywhere between 1 and 3 minutes on high texture settings with 1024 X 768 screen resolution.Coming out of houses is the worst where it usually takes 2 - 3 minutes, up to 4 or 5 if it makes a save too!I'll be getting more ram soon; that and the new patch combined will hopefully ease my problem.Regards,Sean
Just wanted to toss my pennies into the conversation... I have a P4 3GHz with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 7900GS. Load times for traveling in and out of houses are anywhere between 10 and 60 seconds, but the real slayer for me is loading a game, which can take anywhere between 1 and 3 minutes. I seriously can't wait for a patch that addresses this. It's especially brutal if you're having a hard time killing the Beast in the Outskirts... Every time you reload, it takes you to the beginning of the cut scene, so you have to speed through the dialog and tap escape, and, well, lather rinse repeat.Again, can't wait for the patch. This is definitely the worst aspect of the game. Everything else is awesome.
@redsmurfYes! its the ingame copy protection check, I'm afraid we are stuck with that until they remove the ingame checks and only have it scan the cd when you start the game. (Darkstar One had the same and it resulted in major fps loss for some, since it constantly checked as you were playing iirc)
I guess I'm the only one that gets 5-10 second load times. I did get some long load times at one point but I:increased my pagefile size 3072-4096moved it to another drivecleared pagefile on restartuninstalled zone alarmTry and see if these work for youcomputer specscore 2 duo 6750 3.2evga 7950gx2ddr 2 667 2 gb
I don't know if its just me or the above changing of pagefile location works, I tried that and somehow my loading times are better, maybe its just a coincidence but maybe you could try but remember to plug in additional rams, 2GB or better. I haven't installed yet so at the moment I am still stuck on 1 GB but its still doable.
The reason why changing the pagefile of physical disk is simple, as i explained earlier, your page file gets read and write all the time... so the hard drive is always busy.If you have the game and windows on a different hard drive (not partition). one reads informations from the game for loading that area while the other hard drive take that information from memory to write it in the page file. So it almost cut the loading time in half. If you have the game and the pagefile on the same hard drive, that hard drive has to read the information to put it in memory, then write it to the pagefile from the memory, rinse and repeat.This doesnt help saving tho, saving is only taking information from memory and writting it to the disk...
Tweaking the page file isn't going to magically make the load times tolerable, as those of us with enough ram for it to not page at all still have intolerable load times. It doesn't even make sense - why is entering and exiting a tiny house a reason I need to suffer through these huge load times? At the very least, why couldn't the outdoor area be kept suspended in ram while the tiny indoor area was being played? That would cut total load time experienced in finishing the game to like 10%.
Raid Array? That'd slow it down compared to having a SCSI drive not in raid mode. You should ask what type of drive he hasMobidoy said:5 seconds ?? Do you have a raid array of some kind ??? This is really fast
Personally I have a 500GB SATA2 Hard drive and it took 5 seconds to save in chapter 1 then add two seconds roughly every chapter. I've been thinking of getting another SATA2 drive though to put my swap file on to help my horrendous load times (10-30 second, though loading FIRST saved game takes almost a minute and half, after that about a minute to load in chapter 3). BTW I was joking when I said "horrendous".I have 4 drives1 raptor 74gb 10k rpm (dual boot, xp, vista)2 x 250 gb maxtor diamondmax 10 (games, I don't have it striped)1 hitack desktar 1tb (pagefile)uninstalling zone alarm helped a lot maybe disable or shutdown your firewall/anti virus while playing, although this is a dirty fix hopefully a real fix can come soon.I really had high cpu utilization for some reason in idle that's why I did thisphalzyr said:Raid Array? That'd slow it down compared to having a SCSI drive not in raid mode. You should ask what type of drive he hasphalzyr said:5 seconds ?? Do you have a raid array of some kind ??? This is really fast
Here is what I've done to speed up load times:- moved page file to other drive (explained here ealier) - like 10-20% time reduced, both sata 150 drives.- changed texture quality to medium - loading time like 20% decreased, but save still very slow- upgraded CPU - from pentiumD 3GHz to Core 2 Duo e6600 2.4GHz - and this has taken the biggest impact on time loading -> on wyzima market is now like 15 secs (50 secs before changes), save is now less than 5 secs (15 secs before).As mentioned here before, game files (textures, sounds) are stored in the bif archives, taking those files out costs a lot CPU time.Other thing is save files, every single one is like 18-20MB big. After 2 weeks of playing save folder weights like 1,5GB now :]. I've checked what's inside... and I've notice that there is many unnecessary information. iegz item description in any available language, while my version is polish. I think it could be fixed by devs easily.