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Kotaku: Why Games Still Have Bad Loading Times

K

Kyuur

Member
border said:
Could you solve this by simply building hardware with enough RAM to fit an entire game into? Like, if the average game size is 25GB, why not just have 30GB of RAM?

Or would you still have to have massive reload times when you die or fail or want to start a new game?
Click to expand...

You sure could. The why nots:

- cost
- assets are compressed and take up more space when the game decompresses them for use
- the game also uses RAM for non-asset related logic or computed assets, so simply having more RAM than the average disc size isn't a magical cure
- depending on the architecture, system RAM and GPU RAM are often separate, you need to still buffer data to the GPU (so there you cannot eliminate all transfer time) and at least in PC, one does not simply add RAM to the GPU
- but seriously, cost

Would also only make loading near-instant after a long initial load of all assets into RAM and would need to do so each time you switched between games. You could maybe mask this with clever use of streaming techniques.
 
B

border

Member
Kyuur said:
You sure could. The why nots:

- cost
- assets are compressed and take up more space when the game decompresses them for use
- the game also uses RAM for non-asset related logic or computed assets, so simply having more RAM than the average disc size isn't a magical cure
- depending on the architecture, system RAM and GPU RAM are often separate, you need to still buffer data to the GPU (so there you cannot eliminate all transfer time) and at least in PC, one does not simply add RAM to the GPU
- but seriously, cost.
Click to expand...

Obviously none of this is commercially feasible. But could it be done at a hobbyist level if you just wanted to buy like 60GB of RAM for your PC?

Would games have to be especially coded to "load" from RAM rather than the HDD?
 
A

antibolo

Banned
Kyuur said:
You sure could. The why nots:

- cost
- assets are compressed and take up more space when the game decompresses them for use
- the game also uses RAM for non-asset related logic or computed assets, so simply having more RAM than the average disc size isn't a magical cure
- depending on the architecture, system RAM and GPU RAM are often separate, you need to still buffer data to the GPU (so there you cannot eliminate all transfer time) and at least in PC, one does not simply add RAM to the GPU
- but seriously, cost

Would also only make loading near-instant after a long initial load of all assets into RAM and would need to do so each time you switched between games. You could maybe mask this with clever use of streaming techniques.
Click to expand...

Fun fact: some optical disc based arcade hardware (like the Sega Naomi) actually did exactly this. The main board was filled with a huge amount of RAM (at the time) and the entire game was loaded to RAM at startup.
 
C

CadetMahoney

Member
Been playing bayonetta on PC and boy those ssd load times are beautiful.

PS4 has a bottleneck somewhere so SSD's aren't fully taken advantage of at hardware level right?
 
J

Jaded Alyx

Member
Playing SFV PC with my PS4 friends is interesting as those of us on PC load back into the lobby after fights a good while before those on PS4.
 
JimboJones

JimboJones

Member
border said:
Obviously none of this is commercially feasible. But could it be done at a hobbyist level if you just wanted to buy like 60GB of RAM for your PC?

Would games have to be especially coded to "load" from RAM rather than the HDD?
Click to expand...

There is software to make "RAM disks", basically takes how big a portion your willing to give up to make your ram act like a storage device.
 
B

badcrumble

Member
Alpha Phoenix said:
From my experience so far, SSD's in gaming are hit n miss. Some games are just not optimized enough for an SSD to be a major boost. I know for a fact that on Xbox One this is the case, and I believe DF has formally investigated the issue in one of their past articles. It barely makes a difference in some games, while it works nicely in others.
Click to expand...
I think standardizing it across a generation would help a lot with optimization, though.
 
L

Lil Marco

Banned
CadetMahoney said:
PS4 has a bottleneck somewhere so SSD's aren't fully taken advantage of at hardware level right?
Click to expand...

Only the standard PS4's (slim and OG), as they are still SATA 2.

The Pro is SATA 3 so it takes full advantage of conventional SATA SSD's (typically 500MB/s read and write). This and wifi ac was a massive hardware upgrade that Sony should have marketed more tbh.
 
T

Timeaisis

Member
Very good article, thanks for sharing. Load times haven't drastically improved mostly because data has gotten bigger and hard drive speeds haven't really advanced at the same rate. That being said, it's incredible the amount of tricks and techniques developers have used to hide this fact from players. To many, it seems like load times have gotten slightly better, even though, as the article matter-of-factly points out, it should be actually the opposite.

Pretty amazing stuff.
 
T

Tigress

Member
Gta v is the only game where the loading really sticks out to me. Witcher 3 also was a bit long but after playing so many hours of gta veery thing else seems pretty decent.
 
S

Sinatar

Official GAF Bottom Feeder
The art of asset compression has been lost. Texture compression can cut down on load times immensely for very very little image quality loss, but nope, gotta fill up them blu-rays.
 
A

antibolo

Banned
JimboJones said:
There is software to make "RAM disks", basically takes how big a portion your willing to give up to make your ram act like a storage device.
Click to expand...

That won't do much (compared to a SSD) because the game will still need to load assets from that virtual storage device. It's not going to be able to just use those assets in-place because from the point of view of the game it's still just a bunch of files that can't be directly mapped to.
 
Plumpbiscuit

Plumpbiscuit

Member
A lot of this article can be thrown out the window when you realise games like GTA and The Witcher 3 only have 1 initial load time and then none at all during the game after that. Dynamically streaming assets covers load times between chunks of data, so it's entirely possible to have pretty much no load times.
 
O

Octavia

Unconfirmed Member
The argument in the article about "Storage hardware speed hasn't kept up with game size increases" is honestly just not true. There absolutely are diminishing returns when you get to extreme hardware speeds that kick an SSDs ass, like RAM disks and the new high end m.2 stuff. Considering the speed difference from SSD to a RAM disk:


ram-disk-comparison-830x272.jpg
Click to expand...

and you only end up with gains like this:

sml_gallery_13_63_9352.png
Click to expand...

thats not the storage hardwares fault...
 
F

FusedAtoms

Member
Ryce said:
I'm actually really impressed with Injustice 2's load times.
Click to expand...
The match load times are so fast and I'm impressed every time I press continue story cause it's instant , now granted that's just a cutscene while presumably the match is loading in the background but man is that a great way to handle that .
 
P

Poohblaster

Member
We should get consoles to the point where the entire game is loaded into memory instead of streaming off the hard drive.

How much RAM would it take to load the entirety of GTA V, 128 GB?
 
Spladam

Spladam

Member
gblues said:
If unpatched Bloodborne drove you bonkers, be happy you weren't around for the bad old days of the C=64 when it would take 5-10 minutes for a program to load from tape/1541 disk drive.
Click to expand...

Came to post this, having experienced the entire gamut of the PC gaming history the modern load time do not bother me all that much. Some of the youth don't know how good they have it. Shit, I sound old.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
shanafan said:
Not sure in all my years of gaming that load times have ever had a profound effect on me. It's just something that I am used to.
Click to expand...

...I take it you didn't own a PSP?

Love that thing, but sometimes when I'm on the road and the battery is clicking down and some game takes a a minute to load a race or a match, it was painful. (Some games were better than others, some the truly bad-loading games on PSP were among the worst ever on an optical medium.)

Jaded Alyx said:
Playing SFV PC with my PS4 friends is interesting as those of us on PC load back into the lobby after fights a good while before those on PS4.
Click to expand...

I don't know enough about RAM usage to understand what I'm talking about, but I've never understood why games don't always keep lobby/menu elements in memory? The idea that you have to drop everything and reload completely in a fighting game to get to the Character/Stage Select menu is so confusing to me.

Your Character Select screen is way over-designed if it takes as long to load the menu as it does the high-res, fully-animated, voiced character asset packs of the in-game characters. no? If it's so flash that it delays the game, it's a bad menu.

Some online games used to have that problem with their Lobbies too, you'd play a round and then wait a minute for the stats and then reload all over again; games are a lot better at presenting stats in a fly-over of the stage you just played now and not kicking into a load until the new match is set (and even then, you can sometimes choose your loadouts while the match is loading in the background.)

Maybe there's more too it, but I've never quite understood why there's been four generations of Street Fighters where we're still staring at loading screens both before and after a match ... loading the gameplay and all that entails, I get (though Smash Bros has consistently made me curious what they're doing so right that others are't,) but then why the menu load, what's so important happening there?
 
I

icecreamsnow

Member
I'm 38, and I feel like a pensioner for starting gaming in an era with cassette tape, and in my teens had floppy disks.

Pah, you young whippersnappers never had to swap 2-3 disks every couple of screens to play beneath a Steel Sky.
 
Lister

Lister

Banned
This is mostly a console issue and it has to do with loading assets being an intense IO operation that involves CPU, the south bridge, and the data device. All possible bottlenecks on modern consoles.
 
B

border

Member
JimboJones said:
There is software to make "RAM disks", basically takes how big a portion your willing to give up to make your ram act like a storage device.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I figured that there is probably a way to create a virtual HDD in RAM. I'd be curious about what sort of load time reduction it provides.
 
S

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Rellik said:
Still not fast enough, as pointed out in the article you didn't read.
Click to expand...

I haven't really noticed any load time on any game in my PC, including in the launch version of Obduction (mentioned in article as having needlessly bad load times) -- and I have an old SSD and mediocre specs otherwise.
 
P

pa22word

Member
I mean on PS4 you can really just boil it down to the thing only using USB instead of sata for hdd interfacing. USB 3.0 is fast yeah, but people are flat out wasting money throwing an ssd in there for the yields you get off of it. It's doubly weird because the thing has sata built into the motherboard (brd uses it). Just such an odd design choice,
 
K

kaydigi

Member
Street Fighter V comes to a grinding halt on the PS4, biggest offender this gen. Reminds me of loading during the neo geo cd days.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
badcrumble said:
SSD in consoles (as a hardware standard) would still make a major difference. I'm really hoping next-gen consoles opt for 1TB of cheap, not-fastest-on-the-market SSD over 3TB of spinning HDD or 256GB of best-in-the-business SSD. Hopefully the optimal price/storage/performance numbers work out such that that's the decision Sony/MS go with.
Click to expand...

RAID would be better. Funnily enough near the end of the 360's life, some devs started using a basic RAID-style setup by multiplexing reads from both storage and the DVD to squeeze the last bit of speed out of the 360.

Can't do this on One/PS4 since it only ever actually reads off the HDD.

CamHostage said:
...I take it you didn't own a PSP?

Love that thing, but sometimes when I'm on the road and the battery is clicking down and some game takes a a minute to load a race or a match, it was painful. (Some games were better than others, some the truly bad-loading games on PSP were among the worst ever on an optical medium.)



I don't know enough about RAM usage to understand what I'm talking about, but I've never understood why games don't always keep lobby/menu elements in memory? The idea that you have to drop everything and reload completely in a fighting game to get to the Character/Stage Select menu is so confusing to me.

Your Character Select screen is way over-designed if it takes as long to load the menu as it does the high-res, fully-animated, voiced character asset packs of the in-game characters. no? If it's so flash that it delays the game, it's a bad menu.

Some online games used to have that problem with their Lobbies too, you'd play a round and then wait a minute for the stats and then reload all over again; games are a lot better at presenting stats in a fly-over of the stage you just played now and not kicking into a load until the new match is set (and even then, you can sometimes choose your loadouts while the match is loading in the background.)

Maybe there's more too it, but I've never quite understood why there's been four generations of Street Fighters where we're still staring at loading screens both before and after a match ... loading the gameplay and all that entails, I get (though Smash Bros has consistently made me curious what they're doing so right that others are't,) but then why the menu load, what's so important happening there?
Click to expand...

the more stuff you keep in RAM between "levels", the less RAM you have left for fidelity for the parts you don't keep. They could preload every character into RAM, for example, but since they'd all have to share space simultaenously, they'd all have to be downgraded to all fit in RAM at the same time + allow levels to be loaded.

Load them only when needed, especially in a 1v1 fighter, and you can push the fidelity way up.


fakedit: also some games benefit from "player prediction", ie if you can tell they're going a certain way in the world, you can start preloading things that exist in that direction. Fighting games have almost no ability to predict players, since literally every component can switch between one match to the next.
 
B

border

Member
How is it that even cartridge based games like SNES Street Fighter Alpha 2 came to have load times? Don't DS and 3DS games have load times well?
 
Pokemaniac

Pokemaniac

Member
border said:
How is it that even cartridge based games like SNES Street Fighter Alpha 2 came to have load times? Don't DS and 3DS games have load times well?
Click to expand...

SNES games can have load times because load times are more than just retrieving data. On that system, you'd probably be primarily looking at time taken to decompress assets.

DS and 3DS games can have load times because, unlike older cartridge based systems, the memory in the cartridges wasn't more or less as fast as RAM.
 
Chinbo37

Chinbo37

Member
I mostly play on pc with a ssd.

Playing breath of the wild was a bit jarring at first in regards to load times but I guess I'm kind of used to it now
 
S

SlickVic

Member
I'm kind of struggling to think of recent games where a long load time really annoyed me. I'm used to games taking a bit of time on their initial load to start up, but that's largely mitigated by rest mode (at least sometimes; I'm someone who juggles playing a couple games at a time).

Only game recently where it was slightly annoying for me was Doom on PS4. It honestly wasn't that bad, but that's one game where as soon as I died I wanted to immediately get back into the action. Seeing a load screen after a game over was a bit of a momentum killer, coming off the adrenaline surge that preceded it.
 
L

lucebuce12

Member
I personally think loading times have gotten a LOT better for most games these days, particularly open-world games.

It used to be much worse, especially back in the PS2 days. I loved Yakuza 1 and 2 but boy, I would have gotten frustrated with the constant load times if I didn't play it on an emulator.
 
TransTrender

TransTrender

Gold Member
When you only look at rotational speed then yes there's only a 33% increase when going from 5400 to 7200RPM but when you consider the areal density increase you're much higher than that. There's still the problem with shit media and now crap like shingled writes that muck your read performance but I still think a lot of is left on the table regarding file systems and game installs on these 'known entity' devices.
 
K

KampferZeon

Neo Member
this is a non issue, consoles are upgradable. Anyone who can afford it can buy a SSD for ps4 and xbox.
consoles are too price sensitive to have a SSD sku.
 
H

HomerSimpson-Man

Member
border said:
How is it that even cartridge based games like SNES Street Fighter Alpha 2 came to have load times? Don't DS and 3DS games have load times well?
Click to expand...

Alpha 2 had a special compression chip to handle all the graphics data, and it took time to unload it on the SNES which has a slow CPU.
 
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