Long load times in next-gen games...why?

Vapor

Vapor

Well-Known Member
Sep 11, 2013
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It puzzles me why I read of reports of people experiencing long load times in their next-gen games when we have mandatory installs of these games to our next-gen consoles. In the past gen, installing games to your console usually meant less load times, I saw this especially in Battlefield 3, installing the game to the disc meant less loading times for the maps, etc.

Why is it that we're required to install these next-gen games but still have to suffer through long load times?
 
'Next-gen' title's file sizes are much larger than last gen, hence the 50+GB installation of nba 2k14. Add that to the fact that both console's hard drive speeds are 5400 RPM and you'll have some long loading times. Without installing the games, accessing all that data on a blu ray disk would take even longer.
 
I haven't had any problems. Especially since these games actually initially load low rez textures to get the maps up and running, then stream in the high quality textures in after that. Battlefield 4 and Need for Speed are this way.
 
inb4 bunz.

But I think has somewhat to do with having more RAM in the system, so it takes longer to fill it.
 
Viktor said:
inb4 bunz.
Click to expand...

lol

I did warn you guys.

It has to do with what's changed, and what hasn't.

What has changed?

- Amount of memory a game uses before it can "load"

What hasn't?

- The speed at which it can load that data into memory.

Result: Longer (initial) load times.

As I've been predicting for years, they stuck with 2.5" 5400RPM hard drives (for the 3rd generation in a row).. people have been cheering that these systems have 10 times the RAM, but what exactly do you think the result is? If you build a car with 10 times the gas tank, how much longer does that tank take to fill if you don't upgrade your gas pump? (GOOD GAWD I AM AN ANALOGY WIZARD)

Thing is.. games don't actually USE 10 times the RAM to "load".. it's more like 3-4 times, but it's still very noticeable.

What we should see are more and more games with endless worlds that don't have load times once you are "in the game".. that has to do both with general coding advancements and what developers got used to doing last gen and with how many cores/threads are available for such tasks.
 
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You want faster load times? Get an SSD drive. I think Microsoft fumbled the ball with the XB1 not supporting the swapping of harddrives.
 
Hm, probably going to wait till Black Friday sales or Boxing day sales to see if I can get a 1 TB for a good deal.
 
I hope ssds drop in price. Would like to use an ssd as an external once the xb1 is updated.
 
I've only played 3 different PS4 games so far and I don't notice longer load times. o_O
 
You're loading a lot more with the bigger file sizes for higher resolution textures/graphics. Even though there is more RAM, etc. you're talking the same increase. Taking information off the Blu-Ray drive is even slower if it had to do that only. The installs go to a bottom-of-the-line 500 gig 5400 RPM drive. That's going to be slower than a 7200 RPM drive. A solid state drive would be best, but there's no way they are going to use that as it's not cost effective. Solid state is almost instant as far as loading a file, but they haven't been cost reduced the way slower speed hard drives have been over the years for the larger amounts of storage. I wish they could have just used some type of large, solid state memory card with no drive on the system, but that isn't cost effective either. You're talking a lot more to make a large memory card over cheap, plastic Blu-Ray discs that they make by the millions at low cost. Still, imagine how much smaller the Xbox One could be with a tiny little card read instead & the slightly less heat it would make as well.
 
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