Slow loading speeds -- can TWW3 cache stuff ?

[xbalanquebr]

hi all,

I love the game, I have most of the DLCs and find it super fun playing ... but always, specially in the end-game, I get frustrated with the long loading times and I give up, go play something else. Even though I've played it for years (TWW1, 2 and 3), I think I've never had a long victory due to frustration with slow loading times.

Now, I'm software engineer by profession: I'm pretty sure lots of the stuff that are being loaded didn't need to be, and hence it could be done much faster -- even not having any clue how you the game (and GPU) state is organized.

Case in point: press control+L in a game (to load last match) and wait (the offensively long load time) and press control+L again -- to load exactly the same thing it already has in memory (both CPU and GPU). Why it takes so long!?

I know cache consistency is hard (or maybe having to split game state in a more fine-grained way), but c'mon, our (the players) time is worth it!

cheers

ps.: for the record, intel 12k900 with 64Gb memory, and gtx 2080 TI here.

[Darth Alpharius]

do you have the game on an SSD?

[xbalanquebr]

Yes, in a Samsung 980 pro 1Tb (NVMe M.2)

[Lunos]

What sort of hard drive do you have? HDD? SSD? NVMe? Warhammer is notoriously slow on anything but SSDs.

Edit: I see your comment. When you say long load times, how long are you talking?

[xbalanquebr]

I just loaded a campaign on round 128. And just after loading it, I clicked to load it again, the exact same file, it took 26 seconds from I confirmed to load, to when the UI was available to interact again.

[Lunos]

That sounds quite normal actually. The initial campaign load time is quite long as it has a lot of things to populate. After you're in the campaign it shouldn't be much of an issue.

[xbalanquebr]

Notice I measured the second load, of the exact same save game ... Why does it even need to load anything (as opposed to reuse what is already loaded) !?

[xbalanquebr]

For good measure, I repeated the experiment and got 26.2 seconds.

[Elitewrecker PT]

That’s not slow at all

[Lunos]

I'm not a programmer so I couldn't give you an explanation as to the why. I can just state as a layman that I noticed any initial campaign load is the longest.

[Darth Alpharius]

the loading times do get longer if you have a ton of mods also enabled.

[xbalanquebr]

I have zero mods. But I do have most DLCs.

[xbalanquebr]

The very first load is slowest because it has to really load from disk. Subsequent ones likely the OS (windows or linux) will have the content cached in memory.

What takes ~26s is likely deserializing the contents read into their internal game state structure, and moving stuff to the GPU.

My argument is that since they already have most of that state loaded (I'm loading the exact same game) into their game state structure and to GPU, there should be no work, it should be instantaneous.

And loading similar games (like a couple of turns early) should be minimal work.

[Lamp]

Yeah, if we're talkin about the initial campaign load/reload I have a very decent Nvme 2 and it takes anywhere from, 30 seconds to almost a minute. Battle loads and campaign reloads are significantly shorter.

Usually when we see people talking about slow loads they're talking about like 1 minute+ for battles or like 3-5+ minutes or something, (always due to platter drivers and sata ssd's, but sometimes it can be just a low quality/slow M2.)

Your load times aren't bad at all, but if you want them faster your best option is to get some extremely fancy, blazing fast M2. I haven't looked into such a thing as I've always found mine adequate, (I upgraded to M2 in WH2, used to have like 3+ minute waiting times on battles with sata :S)

[xbalanquebr]

I don't think this is a disk issue (I may be wrong), since with 64Gb ram, and not running anything else in the same machine, I expect most things be in cache -- but I don't have the tools to measure it here. So, my assumption is that a fancy M2 wouldn't speed up things.

The issue is with TW3: it shouldn't be loading stuff it already has in memory.

26 seconds is enough to frustrate me, specially when I forgot to give order to an army, clicked on end of turn, and realize I have to reload -- there goes another 26 seconds ... stuff like that happens often enough that it frustrates me.

Specially, because I'm pretty certain if loading was done smarter, as I'm pointing out, it could be almost instantaneous in some cases like loading the same campaign or or two turns back.

[Lamp]

In that case I recommend switching from coffee to green tea and trying some CBD :P Those load times seem fine to me.