The quiet death of loading times in games

[noisyturtle]

Slowly over the past decade games have gravitated towards HD installations over running off of CDs. Code loads areas by player cone of vision rather than entire surrounding areas at once. Hardware has moved from platter-based drives to solid state. So slowly, and without my realizing until this moment, a dagger has been steadily pushed further into the chest of the load time. Now with the next gen of SSDs communicating directly with the GPU and getting more efficient by the year we are in this moment seeing the death of something that has plagued gamers since the early days of home computing. With the next gen of home consoles catching up to, and arguably surpassing, current PC hardware these are the death throes of the load time.

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

[tp4tissue]

They've also got  Direct GPU / Drive streaming  now

So, the GPU can direct access the drive data without eating any CPU cycles. huge savings

[hvontres]

Nah, developers will just add more and more detail to use up whatever speedup you managed to eeek out.

[hwood34]

thank god we've solved loading times by making every game 80gb+

[noisyturtle]

thank god we've solved loading times by making every game 80gb+

the scales have been tipped in favor of obese hard drives who have already lost both feet due to storage diabetes

[tp4tissue]

thank god we've solved loading times by making every game 80gb+

the scales have been tipped in favor of obese hard drives who have already lost both feet due to storage diabetes

PCIE 4 drives can do 5 to 8 GByte/sec  there won't be any bottleneck

[noisyturtle]

thank god we've solved loading times by making every game 80gb+

the scales have been tipped in favor of obese hard drives who have already lost both feet due to storage diabetes

PCIE 4 drives can do 5 to 8 GByte/sec  there won't be any bottleneck

crazy times we live in

[hwood34]

thank god we've solved loading times by making every game 80gb+

the scales have been tipped in favor of obese hard drives who have already lost both feet due to storage diabetes

PCIE 4 drives can do 5 to 8 GByte/sec  there won't be any bottleneck

crazy times we live in

gta online will still take 17 minutes to load in

[Sniping]

i hate that warzone is over 100gb lmfao

[suicidal_orange]

Havent they just been replaced by the 'waiting for players' screen as hardly any games are played offline these days?  I mean it's a great improvement over getting a load screen because you opened a door (which was the only sensible thing to do yet still somehow surprised the game) but for all that speed you still can't play immediately.

[Leslieann]

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

It's quite the opposite.
There has been a very well defined trend of programming getting worse because our systems have so much more power these days.

[Findecanor]

On the flip-side, some games now require to be installed on a SSD. You don't even get the choice.

[tp4tissue]

On the flip-side, some games now require to be installed on a SSD. You don't even get the choice.

You gotta eat more veggies though.. It's good for you just like SSDs.

[iri]

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

It's quite the opposite.
There has been a very well defined trend of programming getting worse because our systems have so much more power these days.

"programming getting worse"? What is that even?

[tp4tissue]

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

It's quite the opposite.
There has been a very well defined trend of programming getting worse because our systems have so much more power these days.

This is mostly taken care of if the developer uses a prebaked game engine.

But the developer only has so much time, he can't do everything.

[Kavik]

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

It's quite the opposite.
There has been a very well defined trend of programming getting worse because our systems have so much more power these days.

"programming getting worse"? What is that even?

In the old days, developers had to use clever tricks to fit everything they needed in RAM or on a game cart. Now the hardware is so much better that devs can get away with being inefficient, but, as TP4 says, that's probably mostly resolved by using premade game engines instead of creating one from scratch for each game or writing the whole game in assembly language.

[iri]

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

It's quite the opposite.
There has been a very well defined trend of programming getting worse because our systems have so much more power these days.

"programming getting worse"? What is that even?

In the old days, developers had to use clever tricks to fit everything they needed in RAM or on a game cart. Now the hardware is so much better that devs can get away with being inefficient

Aren't modern games much more sophisticated than Doom?

[noisyturtle]

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

It's quite the opposite.
There has been a very well defined trend of programming getting worse because our systems have so much more power these days.

"programming getting worse"? What is that even?

In the old days, developers had to use clever tricks to fit everything they needed in RAM or on a game cart. Now the hardware is so much better that devs can get away with being inefficient

Aren't modern games much more sophisticated than Doom?

DOOM 1 Classic:

[Rotwitt]

Man I remember back in the day when you could see everyone in the warcraft 3 lobby loading into the game. It almost felt like participating in a race.

Sendt fra min G8441 med Tapatalk

[Leslieann]

It's just cool to see and think about how games are growing so much more complicated yet so much more efficient in their execution.

It's quite the opposite.
There has been a very well defined trend of programming getting worse because our systems have so much more power these days.

"programming getting worse"? What is that even?

In the old days, developers had to use clever tricks to fit everything they needed in RAM or on a game cart. Now the hardware is so much better that devs can get away with being inefficient, but, as TP4 says, that's probably mostly resolved by using premade game engines instead of creating one from scratch for each game or writing the whole game in assembly language.

Not just carts, they had to fit onto cd and dvd, deal with slow spinning drives, little ram, even today we have storage issues with some games topping 500gigs. Ram in particular was an issue for a longtime and still is (Google Chrome).

While many are using premade engines like Unreal they can still use images that are not optimized. Many also reach for plugins that accomplish their goals and those plugins often contain far more features than they need, or in some cases hidden extras. This is a major problem on cell phones where that "free" plugin that gives you ad revenue also ends up harvesting data and using the GPS. If it has any sort of social media features it's going to have a ton of data harvesting code in it. It's not just small time companies doing this, DRM is a plugin, and how about that client running in the background that installed the game (Steam, Epic, EA)? None of this is actually necessary to run the game itself and in most cases don't even really offer anything extra.

How many resources is Rockstar Social Club using and why is it so critical just to run GTA5? If you run Windows you probably have no idea it's a separate entity as it's pretty seamless but on Linux the Social Club is actually more difficult to get running than the actual game because they used some crappy programming and plugins that the game doesn't. And for what benefit?

[noisyturtle]

Look at the upside, it is making the need for faster and cheaper HDD's that can hold tons of space. Forcing manufacturers to create superior product to meet all these needs at increasingly affordable rate. Tech that just keeps getting better AND cheaper. Consumer wins.

[suicidal_orange]

Look at the upside, it is making the need for faster and cheaper HDD's that can hold tons of space. Forcing manufacturers to create superior product to meet all these needs at increasingly affordable rate. Tech that just keeps getting better AND cheaper. Consumer wins.

Or put another way the consumer must spend more money buying more storage while making more waste (discarded old drives) just so devs can be lazy making downloadable games so bloated and bandwidth hungry that they cost as much as physical media.  Consumer spend spend spends and for what?  A 5 year old SSD is plenty fast if you don't bloat your OS with crap or play games.

[Leslieann]

I still have two 10 year old SSDs that run just fine.
I trust them FAR more than any 5 year old spinner, and certainly faster, the only reason they've been relegated to netbook use is the storage capacity.

[absyrd]

Look at the upside, it is making the need for faster and cheaper HDD's that can hold tons of space. Forcing manufacturers to create superior product to meet all these needs at increasingly affordable rate. Tech that just keeps getting better AND cheaper. Consumer wins.

Or put another way the consumer must spend more money buying more storage while making more waste (discarded old drives) just so devs can be lazy making downloadable games so bloated and bandwidth hungry that they cost as much as physical media.  Consumer spend spend spends and for what?  A 5 year old SSD is plenty fast if you don't bloat your OS with crap or play games.

I still have two 10 year old SSDs that run just fine.
I trust them FAR more than any 5 year old spinner, and certainly faster, the only reason they've been relegated to netbook use is the storage capacity.

Yep. I have some old ass SSDs in my backup PC, my mom's PC, my dad's PC, wyfe's laptop. All were pretty heavily used with music, video, gaming, etc. The original huge fear of them just dying from usage was way overblown, imo.

[tp4tissue]

Yep. I have some old ass SSDs in my backup PC, my mom's PC, my dad's PC, wyfe's laptop. All were pretty heavily used with music, video, gaming, etc. The original huge fear of them just dying from usage was way overblown, imo.

They really can die, but it's usually the controller overheating. The flash itself dying from i/o wear is rare.

That's why you gotta open some of the older ones up and re-do the thermal pad. They dry up and they usually only put them on 1 side.

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=105400.0

[Leslieann]

Early SSDs had/have an issue where if they lost power during boot they corrupt, which is what happened to my first 256gb ssd while experimenting with Win10 thanks to them ditching the F10 boot menu (great job, MS...).  So yeah, they can die, but the failure rate is faaaar lower than spinners.

Side note to TP's comment...
The controller likes cooling, running cold is actually detrimental to the memory itself.

[Darthbaggins]

Only thing i use standard HDD's for is my media library/server, games and visual tools go on my SSD array (500GB NVMe and 2 - 1tb Samsung SSD's).  It really blew me away when I saw that Microsoft Flight Sim recommended the best install on a NVMe over a sata based SSD - I do understand why as it is a resource heavy game/sim (that is not streamlined at all).  I have considered moving my PS4 Pro to a SSD since 1TB 2.5's have plummeted in price compared to when I bought the Samsung versions I have had for a few years now (paid $200/drive years ago - at the time it was a steal). 
I know on the console side they are definitely working towards minimizing loading screens since due to the size of the worlds being created.

[Sintpinty]

thank god we've solved loading times by making every game 80gb+

*laughs in tiny roguelites that take up 2 GB of space*

[Leslieann]

I think the worst recent game has to be GTA Online, seriously, WTF, is wrong with that loading system.
It's not downloading a ton, I've watched the network stats and I've also watched the cpu and drive stats, that's not the issue. My understanding is it's even gotten worse.

Console players are even worse off, I've heard several times of 45+ minute load times.

[noisyturtle]

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2020/10/25/last-of-us-remastered-load-times-ps4/

70% and we are not even into the next gen yet

[Darthbaggins]

I think the worst recent game has to be GTA Online, seriously, WTF, is wrong with that loading system.
It's not downloading a ton, I've watched the network stats and I've also watched the cpu and drive stats, that's not the issue. My understanding is it's even gotten worse.

Console players are even worse off, I've heard several times of 45+ minute load times.

The loading times are the reason why I no longer play it, even though I do love it over-all.