Loading........
Ok the game looks really nice, but the loading takes forever!
Every time I enter a new area the loading takes several minutes, it's nuts!
Anything i can do to speed it up?
Laoding........
Page file size minimum is 1400 mb. Set it to 14000 mb for good measure. That'll speed it up a bit.
How much RAM are you running? At 1 gb the game loads in about 30 seconds per level (still annoying, considering how fast other games (read: KoTOR) load, but still livable). There are horror stories of long loading at 512 mb even, so go pick up another 512 mb for about 50 bucks, the price of the game in the first place, and that'll help a lot, according to many.
How much RAM are you running? At 1 gb the game loads in about 30 seconds per level (still annoying, considering how fast other games (read: KoTOR) load, but still livable). There are horror stories of long loading at 512 mb even, so go pick up another 512 mb for about 50 bucks, the price of the game in the first place, and that'll help a lot, according to many.
yeah ... 30 seconds ....
I actually had the game load for about a half an hour. No kidding. Left the game loading, went to watch an ep of simpsons and when i came back, it was just finishing.
Welll .. what you get for playing the game on 256 mb of RAM i guess.
I actually had the game load for about a half an hour. No kidding. Left the game loading, went to watch an ep of simpsons and when i came back, it was just finishing.
Welll .. what you get for playing the game on 256 mb of RAM i guess.
When you compare a game to Oblivion, God kills a kitten.
During the recent Christmas break, I had the occasion to run Bloodlines on my laptop with only 512Mb of RAM. If people with 1GB of RAM think that the loading times are horrible they should try running this on 512MB, not to mention the stuttering due to continuous swapping in large outdoor areas or the 1+ minute it takes at every game exit to clean up the swap file.
Oddly enough, even if my laptop has a Radeon 7500 the game runs fine at the same resolution I use at home on my 5700Ultra. While some FX are missing (nothing earth shattering: water has a lame cubemap instead of real-time reflections) the framerate is almost the same. Something must be terribly borked in this engine.
Oddly enough, even if my laptop has a Radeon 7500 the game runs fine at the same resolution I use at home on my 5700Ultra. While some FX are missing (nothing earth shattering: water has a lame cubemap instead of real-time reflections) the framerate is almost the same. Something must be terribly borked in this engine.
1.5 gb
I was playing this game on 512 megabytes of RAM, and I was running without any patches, the game lagggggeddd. Load times were about 30 seconds, everyplace I turned it would pause to load stuff from the swap and it was just horrible gameplay. I really like this game's story though, so I decided it was time for a hardware upgrade to see if it would fix it. I put a 1GB stick of RAM in and now there is no lag at all and load times are much faster. (I'm not hesitant to go into buildings that need to load now haha)
So yes, putting more memory in your computer will increase this games performance. Oh, and I haven't increased my swap file to the recommended size yet. But it's still smooth... only very very little lag when levels first load then nothing after that, and if so, it's a video card issue (radeon 9600 pro).
Oh, and my total system memory is 1.5 Gigs.
Athlon XP 2800
I was playing this game on 512 megabytes of RAM, and I was running without any patches, the game lagggggeddd. Load times were about 30 seconds, everyplace I turned it would pause to load stuff from the swap and it was just horrible gameplay. I really like this game's story though, so I decided it was time for a hardware upgrade to see if it would fix it. I put a 1GB stick of RAM in and now there is no lag at all and load times are much faster. (I'm not hesitant to go into buildings that need to load now haha)
So yes, putting more memory in your computer will increase this games performance. Oh, and I haven't increased my swap file to the recommended size yet. But it's still smooth... only very very little lag when levels first load then nothing after that, and if so, it's a video card issue (radeon 9600 pro).
Oh, and my total system memory is 1.5 Gigs.
Athlon XP 2800
Yeah, I had the same problem with my laptop. It had only 512 Mb of RAM, plus the hard disk wasn't all that fast. I had a 4 Gb pagefile, but that didn't really help loading times. Suggest you keep a book close at hand to read - because that's what I did. Heh. Or you could get another 512 Mb RAM - it may or may not help loading times, but will certainly get rid of the stuttering problems in-game. Personally I don't mind long loading times, as long as my game itself has no problems.
mysfx: It's not the engine, its DirectX. A Geforce 5700 Ultra supports DirectX 9.0c while the Radeon 7500 probably supports 8.0 or 8.1, something like that. DX 8.0 and 8.1 support far less features than 9.0c (like shadows, special texture maps etc etc), which will take up less resources. FRs will therefore be comparable. However comparing 2 DX9.0c cards like a 6800 GT vs a 5700 Ultra will obviously show FR differences. At the moment my 6800 GT runs on 1280 by 1024 res... and frame rates are BETTER than my Mobility Radeon 9200 on 1024 x 768.
mysfx: It's not the engine, its DirectX. A Geforce 5700 Ultra supports DirectX 9.0c while the Radeon 7500 probably supports 8.0 or 8.1, something like that. DX 8.0 and 8.1 support far less features than 9.0c (like shadows, special texture maps etc etc), which will take up less resources. FRs will therefore be comparable. However comparing 2 DX9.0c cards like a 6800 GT vs a 5700 Ultra will obviously show FR differences. At the moment my 6800 GT runs on 1280 by 1024 res... and frame rates are BETTER than my Mobility Radeon 9200 on 1024 x 768.
[QUOTE=araknid70]mysfx: It's not the engine, its DirectX. A Geforce 5700 Ultra supports DirectX 9.0c while the Radeon 7500 probably supports 8.0 or 8.1, something like that. DX 8.0 and 8.1 support far less features than 9.0c (like shadows, special texture maps etc etc), which will take up less resources. FRs will therefore be comparable. However comparing 2 DX9.0c cards like a 6800 GT vs a 5700 Ultra will obviously show FR differences. At the moment my 6800 GT runs on 1280 by 1024 res... and frame rates are BETTER than my Mobility Radeon 9200 on 1024 x 768.[/QUOTE]I've been using 3DAnalyze since the firsty day I have Bloodlines to force partial precision shaders (which may help NV3x line of cards in certain situations). I can assure you that even if I force the card to run as if it was a GeForce2 (no shaders, fixed function pipeline), the game still runs bad. This game does not have many high resolution textures, nor many advanced FX. The 7500 is a DirectX 7 generation card with a fixed function graphic pipeline and it has half the memory bandwidth and fillrate of a GeForce 5700U. There is no sensible situation where it should pull nearly identical framerates of a much better card. Unless it is badly CPU limited or the code itself is broken.
Back IT: Windows sets automatically the size of the swap file at 1.5x the size of RAM. People with 512Mb of RAM should have a 768 MB swap file by default. There's no advantage (sometimes the system may even run even a little slower!) in increasing the size of the swap file beyond 2x memory size.
Another solution is to increase Windows disk performance by setting to "1" the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache. Don't do this on a RAID system, though. It may cause write errors on the disk due to a Windows bug.
Untill Troika or Activision will release a patch to improve performance/memory usage the best way to reduce loading times is to exit the game every 20 minutes of playing or when entering a new large outdoor area (ie when travelling from one hub to another). It sucks, I know. Also Half Life 2 suffers from loading times but the memory usage does not seem so intensive, despite large and more detailed areas.
Back IT: Windows sets automatically the size of the swap file at 1.5x the size of RAM. People with 512Mb of RAM should have a 768 MB swap file by default. There's no advantage (sometimes the system may even run even a little slower!) in increasing the size of the swap file beyond 2x memory size.
Another solution is to increase Windows disk performance by setting to "1" the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache. Don't do this on a RAID system, though. It may cause write errors on the disk due to a Windows bug.
Untill Troika or Activision will release a patch to improve performance/memory usage the best way to reduce loading times is to exit the game every 20 minutes of playing or when entering a new large outdoor area (ie when travelling from one hub to another). It sucks, I know. Also Half Life 2 suffers from loading times but the memory usage does not seem so intensive, despite large and more detailed areas.
Keep in mind, msyx (I think I missed a letter there 
) that this is the Half-Life 2 engine. It was made to run on even the most craptastic graphics cards. You can play HL2 with a Geforce 2 just fine-- it will look bad, but the frame rates will be very playable (worse than a high-quality card, but playable). I don't think the lack of difference is in somekind of bug, but in the general quality of this engine. Added to the fact that this game is understandably rather CPU intensive (so much RPG stuff running in the background... does this hit, does this not, etc...) it makes sense that even older graphics cards can run it.
And also the Nvidia FX series (anything starting with a 5) is known for being a "bad" performer in HL2, even when running in the stripped down DirectX 8 mode (bad is an understatement though). I'm too lazy to pull some benchmarks, but go to Anandtech and read their HL2 sections for proof.
) that this is the Half-Life 2 engine. It was made to run on even the most craptastic graphics cards. You can play HL2 with a Geforce 2 just fine-- it will look bad, but the frame rates will be very playable (worse than a high-quality card, but playable). I don't think the lack of difference is in somekind of bug, but in the general quality of this engine. Added to the fact that this game is understandably rather CPU intensive (so much RPG stuff running in the background... does this hit, does this not, etc...) it makes sense that even older graphics cards can run it.And also the Nvidia FX series (anything starting with a 5) is known for being a "bad" performer in HL2, even when running in the stripped down DirectX 8 mode (bad is an understatement though). I'm too lazy to pull some benchmarks, but go to Anandtech and read their HL2 sections for proof.
i play on 256mb and it taks 5 min to load though it is a long time tommorow im getting another 256mb so hopefully it will go faster
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