SSD Does NOTHING to improve Loading Times for SWTOR

[Kryptorchid]

logic fail.

 

You really don't see the difference between a BF3 map and an entire PLANET filled with various talking npcs, monsters and instnaces???

Inspect them all and tell me the stats on their legs.

 

*wooooosh*

[Frostvein]

I get very little load times, no where near even 10 seconds. Maybe 8 when I load the game, 4-6 for planets on my SSD.

[Massimoto]

I get very little load times, no where near even 10 seconds. Maybe 8 when I load the game, 4-6 for planets on my SSD.

 

Actually it would be interesting for all to see if you FRAP it and link the video. Thanks in advance!

[Frostvein]

Actually it would be interesting for all to see if you FRAP it and link the video. Thanks in advance!

 

I'll try when I get home. I know people have been having issues on high end machines, but I never saw the problem. (that's not to say there isn't a problem, though - just that it hasn't been my experience)

 

Also, I have a standard HD that I have Win7 loaded on, and a separate SSD that has my games, including SWToR.

 

I also run GameBooster.

[notebene]

The engine is horribly coded. I have an i7 at 4.1 ghz, SLI 580 gtx, and an SSD, but I still get 3-4 minute load times.

 

I have the same thing, no SSD (just a 10k raptor, i can't afford $10,000 per gig on an SSD, and don't much like paying off their R&D, so i'm still waiting), and my ghz is considerably lower (probably sub 3, but still an i7), and I fly.

 

Well, 45 seconds to bring a character into a game. I believe 'in between' area screens, when I do get them, are all much speedier than that.

 

So it begs the question: what else? Memory speed/type? I think mine is DDR31600-ish? OS 32/64?

 

I find this whole thing intriguing. Some people have far better pieces than I do, and have troubles, and I really wonder why.

[Aidan_Pride]

the main factor about loading times seem to be RAM followed by CPU maybe.

 

i installed the game on a slow HD first, then installed it again on a 3 times faster one...no improvement.

 

a guildmate has a little better cpu, but 6gb instead of my 3gb and he loads a lot faster than me. another guildmate has a similar cpu and lower memory...he loads the slowest of us all.

 

so my conclusion is...first comes memory size...then cpu and last HD speed for loading times.

[Zyanzor]

I have the same thing, no SSD (just a 10k raptor, i can't afford $10,000 per gig on an SSD, and don't much like paying off their R&D, so i'm still waiting), and my ghz is considerably lower (probably sub 3, but still an i7), and I fly.

 

Well, 45 seconds to bring a character into a game. I believe 'in between' area screens, when I do get them, are all much speedier than that.

 

So it begs the question: what else? Memory speed/type? I think mine is DDR31600-ish? OS 32/64?

 

I find this whole thing intriguing. Some people have far better pieces than I do, and have troubles, and I really wonder why.

 

Because they don't have the high end computers they claim to have. You notice not one video has ever been posted to prove their long loading times? It's because they are running crappy out of date computers that can only run Hello Kitty on lowest settings.

[Sicknss]

*wooooosh*

 

Perfectly symbolizing your understanding of the differences between an mmo and an fps.

[Kryptorchid]

Perfectly symbolizing your understanding of the differences between an mmo and an fps.

 

*woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh*

[Badelito]

I have a 1-4minutes loading time into almost every planet except Fleet, my ship and for some weird reason, balmorra.

 

My buddy with 2 SSD discs, got a 5-7seconds loadingtime into tatooine, whilst I had 2minutes 22seconds when we pressed the shuttle door exactly at the same time.

 

Dont tell me its about the SSD. As stated, CPU baby

[Sicknss]

*woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh*

 

y my MMO no lode liek fps?

[DigitalPrime]

I bought a 120gb SSD with my new i7 2700k , ATI 7970 rig

 

I load into every planet before my friends, am im always the first in warzones.

 

Im not doubting anyones problems, but mine flys

Edited February 16, 2012 by DigitalPrime

[Kryptorchid]

First:

...2 SSD discs

Not going to lie, this little slip made my lol pretty hard.

 

Second:

y my MMO no lode liek fps?

 

LOL, I think you are the easiest person to troll evah!

Edited February 16, 2012 by Kryptorchid

[Chessack]

The engine is horribly coded. I have an i7 at 4.1 ghz, SLI 580 gtx, and an SSD, but I still get 3-4 minute load times.

 

Something is clearly wrong on your end. I get load times on the order of seconds, not minutes. I've not had 3-4 minute load times TOR, ever, no matter where I'm zoning, no matter what the conditions around me. More like 3-4 seconds... maybe 10, 12. But not minutes.

[SIMJEDI]

Just installed a ssd the other day. From the log-in screen to my ship it's 6 seconds, and for a planet it's 30 seconds.

[DigitalDreamz]

What's even worse than the load times is the time when you quit the client to the time your operating system is at a workable state. Play for about an hour or two then quit client. My computer just zings and hums for at least 3 minutes before I can finally use Windows 7 again.

 

 

Try WoW's 64 bit client. Play for a couple of hours, quit the client and Windows is instantly ready. It's as fast as when you click quit, boom Windows us up and ready. It doesn't even take a 'few' seconds, literally one second and you're back.

[Sambailey]

This caught my eye, so I'll throw you all a bone. Think of an SSD as a river. Now think of the little wire you have connecting your SSD to your Motherboard, this is a dam. No matter how fast that river wants to flow, it still has to push little trickles of water/data through the dam.

 

If you have an SSD installed, you had better go make sure that your A) Motherboard is SATAIII ready and B) your connector cable to the SSD and Mobo is a SATAIII line.

 

Next, when you're Mobo pulls the info off your SSD/HDD, it send it to the Processor for, you guessed it, processing. If your processor isn't cranked up or is an older slower model, it also wont be able to handel all the information coming from your SSD/HDD. And it is bringing in a lot of data from this game (this is assuming you are in fact running everything with SATAIII).

 

While your CPU is processing all this incoming data it needs to hold onto it while it's processing everything. It temporary stores this processed information in its random access memory banks, also known as RAM. People say that 4 gigs of RAM is fine. It is, if you're a casual/cheap gamer. However the fact of the matter is that the more RAM you have and higher frequency (1600mhz+) the more your CPU can move between itself and the SSD/HDD and back down through your GPU and out to your screen and into your eyeballs.It also dictates how fast your PC can run multiple programs at one time and how fast you can move between them with alt-tab.

 

The GPU the does not effect load speeds. All's it does is render the graphic settings of your game from the information pumped in from SSD to Mobo to CPU. However a slow/weak/old GPU will take longer to render the game from past the load screen to the 'splash' screen (the iconic wallpaper BioWare uses with Malgus, Setal Shan and the old Jedi grand master).

 

Nutshell. Your computer is complex, there are several things that can bottleneck it, and it's not the game that is running slow, it's your hardware. This machine loads Fleet in about 8 seconds on Saturday night with 150 people standing around. The longest load time is Belsavis, which takes about 20 seconds as it is a huge zone with a lot of information to process. For those who're still reading this, here're my specs:

 

ASUS P8Z68-V PRO (sataIII, sandybridge chipset)

Intel i7-2600k @4.1

Crucial m4 128GB SSD (game drive)

Carver Black 2TB HDD (boot drive)

16GB 1600mhz Kingston HyperX RAM

Nvidia GTX 580 1.5gb

875 watt Corsair PSU.

Edited February 16, 2012 by Sambailey

[Sicknss]

First:

LOL, I think you are the easiest person to troll evah!

 

Maybe next month when there are only 5 people per planet it'll load faster, until then there's always BF3.

[SirRobin]

The engine is horribly coded.

 

QFT... Yeah, its seems pretty sloppy. Its almost like they copy pasted code from WAR for most of the "behind the scenes" stuff.

Edited February 16, 2012 by SirRobin

[Retadine]

3-4 min load times with an SSD is a CPU issue for sure.

 

If you know for sure your CPU isn't terrible, then it could be your heatsink isn't mounted properly. If the proc is running too hot, it will automatically downclock itself to prevent it from burning up. I know this cause it happened to me once. Had to take it out, clean up all the thermal paste, reapply thermal paste, then remount. After that, my proc was running at full speed again (overclocked too with stock heatsink and fan ).

[Zeromanicus]

This caught my eye, so I'll throw you all a bone. Think of an SSD as a river. Now think of the little wire you have connecting your SSD to your Motherboard, this is a dam. No matter how fast that river wants to flow, it still has to push little trickles of water/data through the dam.

 

If you have an SSD installed, you had better go make sure that your A) Motherboard is SATAIII ready and B) your connector cable to the SSD and Mobo is a SATAIII line.

 

Next, when you're Mobo pulls the info off your SSD/HDD, it send it to the Processor for, you guessed it, processing. If your processor isn't cranked up or is an older slower model, it also wont be able to handel all the information coming from your SSD/HDD. And it is bringing in a lot of data from this game (this is assuming you are in fact running everything with SATAIII).

 

While your CPU is processing all this incoming data it needs to hold onto it while it's processing everything. It temporary stores this processed information in its random access memory banks, also known as RAM. People say that 4 gigs of RAM is fine. It is, if you're a casual/cheap gamer. However the fact of the matter is that the more RAM you have and higher frequency (1600mhz+) the more your CPU can move between itself and the SSD/HDD and back down through your GPU and out to your screen and into your eyeballs.It also dictates how fast your PC can run multiple programs at one time and how fast you can move between them with alt-tab.

 

The GPU the does not effect load speeds. All's it does is render the graphic settings of your game from the information pumped in from SSD to Mobo to CPU. However a slow/weak/old GPU will take longer to render the game from past the load screen to the 'splash' screen (the iconic wallpaper BioWare uses with Malgus, Setal Shan and the old Jedi grand master).

 

Nutshell. Your computer is complex, there are several things that can bottleneck it, and it's not the game that is running slow, it's your hardware. This machine loads Fleet in about 8 seconds on Saturday night with 150 people standing around. The longest load time is Belsavis, which takes about 20 seconds as it is a huge zone with a lot of information to process. For those who're still reading this, here're my specs:

 

ASUS P8Z68-V PRO (sataIII, sandybridge chipset)

Intel i7-2600k @4.1

Crucial m4 128GB SSD (game drive)

Carver Black 2TB HDD (boot drive)

16GB 1600mhz Kingston HyperX RAM

Nvidia GTX 580 1.5gb

875 watt Corsair PSU.

 

Very useful info!

[ZapperWeisman]

I have an Intel 3930k, 2x GTX 580s in SLi, 3x Crucial SSDs in RAID 0 (about 850ish read speed. limited by SATA II), 16GBs of RAM and FiOS with 43mbs down and 36mbs up with a consistently low ping and 0 packet loss. Nothing about my setup could be considered slow yet this game, in many places, loads painfully slow.

 

When loading into one of the slow to load places the loading screen will come up and the bar will move a little and then stop for a while. While it's stopped the CPU is nearly idle and the HDD usage is also nearly idle. My PC is not doing anything except waiting for something from the server! Once it gets whatever it was waiting for the load bar moves really fast and the CPU and HDD usage kicks in and loads within seconds.

 

This is a client and/or server issue. Some people either are lucky or fudging the the actual wait time. I am getting really tired of these load time issues. My PC loads everything else really, really fast. This game is the slowest to load I have. It's highly irritating.

[-Kraxis-]

Hero Engine Sucks. You can't polish a turd.

 

Bioware fails at optimization.

 

Fanbois will defend Bioware no matter what.

 

 

Here's my constructive criticism for Bioware: Hire some REAL PROGRAMMERS, PLEASE!.. oh wait, this is EA we're talking about.. not a place known for keeping true talent around.

Edited May 9, 2012 by -Kraxis-

[ironix]

My intel SATAII ssd loading times are around 10s at the most.

 

Load Corellia and tell me that.

[Haltis]

I scanned through most of this thread and haven't seen it mentioned, so I'll add some of my experience.

 

I have an older iMac from 2008 that I use Bootcamp to run 64bit Win 7 to run SWTOR. I had put an Intel SSD into this Mac long before SWTOR was released and I made a bootcamp partition specifically and only for SWTOR. The performance increase from adding an SSD to this Mac was absolutely amazing. It was like a brand new computer. Best upgrade I've ever made and this is coming from someone who has routinely built computers since he was a teenager (I'm now 36).

 

Anyway....I was hoping the SSD would increase the horrid load times too. But it ends up it didn't. Win 7 flies (as does Lion) but I still get 5 minutes or more on loading screens (forget pvp queue while questing).

 

I come to find out that you need to enable AHCI mode (as opposed to running in IDE mode) to unlock some speed improvements. With Windows boxes it's easy. You have to change a setting in your BIOS and then make sure Windows loads the appropriate drivers, which may require you to delete the IDE drivers from the Device Manager and reboot. For Intel controllers, the drivers are called Rapid Storage or something similar.

 

With a Mac you have to hack the EFI to accomplish this. I did this and it works however the SATA controller in my 2008 iMac seems to be locked into SATA I mode on purpose even though it's capable of SATA II (And the drive I bought is SATA III -- it's going in my next machine.) It happens to be a limitation imposed by Apple because of the optical drive in the system, apparently. Something I wouldn't have even fathomed when I purchased it. Still the best investment I've ever made for this computer.