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Advice on Slow Asset Loading in Archage

JaimlJaiml Member UncommonPosts: 130
in Hardware

I don't know if it is an Archeage thing or just my system but I find that the assets load slow for me... sometimes minutes to fully load.  Specifically the character models, mobs and quest information.

 

I know just enough about this stuff to be dangerous to myself.  I'll try to explain what is going on.

 

I assume the assets are stored locally.  So I am surprised to see NPC and character names running around or standing on my screen with no character model attached.  Yes, just names floating in the air.  For NPCs I often have to wait a minute or two until they load.  The quest "!" and "?" take some time to load as well.  I can't go fight without waiting for an area to load or else I get killed by invisible mobs.

 

I'm still playing because I spend most of my time farming but eventually I will want to spend more time in the wilds.  Once an area loads I am fine.  I did a quest with over 60 people on the screen plus mobs and it was fine.  I arrived at the area early and let everything load.  Even the spawning mobs were no trouble.  I just have to give it time to load up the majority of an area.

I should probably load another game and try it.  The last game I played was The Secret World, it did fine BUT I was using a different HD and Windows Vista.  I upgrade the operating system and the HD specifically to have a smooth run with Arachege.

 

My question is, can it be my system?  I kinda hope so because that is fixable.  Here is what I am running.

 

Gforce  9800GtX

ASUS P5N Deluxe - Dual Core E8500 @ 3.16GHZ

6 Gigs of Ram

Windows 7

1T HD with 883G free SATA 2

DirectX 10

 

All drivers are up to date.

 

Any Advice?  Something else I need to tell you about my system before I can get advice?

 

Comments

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
    Originally posted by Jaiml

    1T HD with 883G free SATA 2

    I found your problem.  Hard drives are slow.  Really slow.  So they make lots of things load slowly.  The more stuff you have to load, the slower it goes.  That you list the capacity but not the particular model makes it very plausible that you may even have a hard drive that is slower than most.

    The solution is to load the game off of something fast, like this:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721108

    Get an SSD, install the OS and commonly used programs on it, and suddenly everything will load fast.

    I haven't played Archeage in particular, so it's possible that even with an SSD, your processor would make loading times slower than desired.  But it would be shocking if the SSD doesn't give you an enormous speedup in cases where loading is slow.

  • JaimlJaiml Member UncommonPosts: 130

    Shame on me, I purchased a cheap one for $50.  I should have know better!

     

    I will look into what you have said!  Thank you!!!!

     

    For the record here is what I purchased:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5AD1S72218

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
    You managed to find a hard drive that the manufacturer won't even tell you what it is or who made it.  I didn't know that such a thing even existed.  So I really have no idea what it is, but I strongly doubt that it uses the latest and greatest hard drive optimizations.
  • JaimlJaiml Member UncommonPosts: 130

    ROFL  image

     

    You get what you pay for!  I bought cheap I got cheap!

     

    Thanks again!

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

    Get something like this:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721106

    It's not terribly big, but it'll hold Archeage and maybe 1-2 other games. If you really pushed it, you could get Windows + Archeage on there probably, but you'd have to keep an eye on storage space. Same price as you are paying for whatever that hard drive you ordered is.

    And it will be fast. Very fast.

  • JJ82JJ82 Member UncommonPosts: 1,258

    While your Sata 2 is slow, it isn't the only problem. The thing can still push out 300mb/s.

    Archeage is made with Cryoengine 3 and designed to offset a great deal to the GPU so your old 9800gtx which cant even do DX11 is a major bottleneck with its slow GPU and low memory.

    Do this next time you log in, hopefully you can do this during an off period with little to no queue (lol good luck). Once logged in and at your character screen, go into options and turn all the graphics down to low, turn off all special settings like FAA, anti-aliasing and then after applying, log completely OUT of the game so the settings are saved. Next time you load, it will load with the new settings.

    If it loads a lot faster, its your weak GPU causing the problem. but also, Trion is being idiotic and using hackshield and that thing is a massive resource hog and acts really strangely on systems. So close down anything you don't need when loading the game, including virus protections....hackshield...wtf.

    EDITED TO ADD: I am giving the above advise because my friend that was playing this launch version has his SATA 3.1s on a raid 1 and still has long load times, that's with an i7, 12gb ram and 2 465s SLI...his issue was with hackshield and his processes running.

    "People who tell you you’re awesome are useless. No, dangerous.

    They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
    http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
    Originally posted by JJ82

    While your Sata 2 is slow, it isn't the only problem. The thing can still push out 300mb/s.

    Archeage is made with Cryoengine 3 and designed to offset a great deal to the GPU so your old 9800gtx which cant even do DX11 is a major bottleneck with its slow GPU and low memory.

    Do this next time you log in, hopefully you can do this during an off period with little to no queue (lol good luck). Once logged in and at your character screen, go into options and turn all the graphics down to low, turn off all special settings like FAA, anti-aliasing and then after applying, log completely OUT of the game so the settings are saved. Next time you load, it will load with the new settings.

    If it loads a lot faster, its your weak GPU causing the problem. but also, Trion is being idiotic and using hackshield and that thing is a massive resource hog and acts really strangely on systems. So close down anything you don't need when loading the game, including virus protections....hackshield...wtf.

    EDITED TO ADD: I am giving the above advise because my friend that was playing this launch version has his SATA 3.1s on a raid 1 and still has long load times, that's with an i7, 12gb ram and 2 465s SLI...his issue was with hackshield and his processes running.

    While a SATA 2 cable can deliver 300 MB/s, a hard drive can't handle anywhere near that.  If you're trying to load a bunch of small files--a common scenario in games--a hard drive might be struggling along at around 1 MB/s.  If the problem is that you're riding a slow tricycle, getting a 6 lane superhighway all to yourself really doesn't help.

    A video card won't meaningfully affect loading times.  PCI Express has enough bandwidth to completely fill up video memory in a fraction of a second.  At worst, this could cause some stuttering if you try to load too much in one frame.  If the video card is the problem, the symptom will be consistently low frame rates, not long loading times.

  • JaimlJaiml Member UncommonPosts: 130

    Thanks everyone for taking an interest in this for me!

     

    A few days ago I dropped all graphic settings to test if that was the problem.  It did not have any affect on loading assets any faster.  Specifically the character models and player planted tress and crops still load slow.. measured in minutes.

     

    Today I installed the drive I had pulled out to add the 1T drive and I installed Windows 7 on the old one to see what would happen.  This is the drive:

     

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136769&cm_re=wd5000aakx-_-22-136-769-_-Product

     

    The problem may have become worse.  Somethings started showing up in black and then the skin would appear.  Still the slow load times on assets.

     

    I wanted to just purchase a SATA3 drive as Quizzical suggested BUT my motherboard does not support SATA3, only SATA2.

     

    Sooooo want to recommend an ATX Motherboard, chip set, and HD for me?  Can you keep it around $500?  Or at this point should I add a bit more and just throw in a video card as well?

     

    The computer I use now was build for WoW release and it has served me well, but maybe it is no longer keeping up =)

     

    I'll take the 1T I bought and turn in into storage for pictures and home movies =)

     

    Thanks again for all the help!

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
    SATA is backward compatible.  If you have plug a SATA 3 drive into a SATA 2 port, it will work just fine, but at SATA 2 speeds.  That caps your performance at 300 MB/s (realistically, more like 280 MB/s because you can't really saturate the connection), but even 100 MB/s is blazing fast for real-world loading speeds.  The problem is that when loading many small things off of a hard drive, it can easily be more like 1 MB/s because you spend most of the time seeking instead of reading.
  • JaimlJaiml Member UncommonPosts: 130

    It's good to know smart people! =)

     

    I just ordered the Kingston SST drive.  I'll update how things go!

  • JaimlJaiml Member UncommonPosts: 130
    Originally posted by JJ82

    .

    Archeage is made with Cryoengine 3 and designed to offset a great deal to the GPU so your old 9800gtx which cant even do DX11 is a major bottleneck with its slow GPU and low memory.

    ........

    If it loads a lot faster, its your weak GPU causing the problem. but also, Trion is being idiotic and using hackshield and that thing is a massive resource hog and acts really strangely on systems. So close down anything you don't need when loading the game, including virus protections....hackshield...wtf.

    EDITED TO ADD: I am giving the above advise because my friend that was playing this launch version has his SATA 3.1s on a raid 1 and still has long load times, that's with an i7, 12gb ram and 2 465s SLI...his issue was with hackshield and his processes running.

     

    Two thoughts here.

     

    First - I installed the SSD and I love it.  This is the first SSD I have owned.  I am amazed at the speed it gave the computer.  Fixed assets now load great on Archeage.  This includes all plants, structures and any fixed object in the environment or placed by a player.  The load times on the game have dropped tremendously.  It feels like load times are 75% faster though I have not bench marked it.  This was a huge improvement.

     

    Second - NPC and characters are still loading slow.  Very slow.  You can see the paper doll appear in the spread eagle format then a second later the outfit appears and they return not normal.  I am still waiting minutes for all characters and NPCs to load when I visit a hub.  As for frame rate, most of the time frame rate is good, about 30fps at normal settings.  Every couple of minutes everything freezes for about 3 seconds and then releases and all is fine.  Annoying and potentially deadly!

    Based on JJ82's observation that Cryoengine likes to dump work off to the GPU I am considering upgrading the video card.  If Cryoengine is doing that then I should get more bang for my buck by upgrading the video and not the MoBo and CPU, correct? 

    If that is the case then I am looking for a $150 to $200 video card.  The reviews I have been reading are saying that the Radeon R9 270 is one of the best cards for the money in this price range right now.

    Since the info I have been getting from JJ82 and Quizzical have been good I am back for more advice =)

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

    NPCs a lot of those textures have to be updated from the network. The model and texture is stored locally, but the engine doesn't know which one to use until the server tells it (hence the paper doll until it finds out). I'm afraid you've probably done all you can short of getting a better internet connection.

    That said, a new video card wouldn't hurt - and you could crank up some settings and it would look better, but it probably won't fix the NPCs loading slowly.

    Glad to hear the SSD worked out.

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
    Before spending more on upgrades, you should probably ask yourself how much you really want to pour into an older rig before you decide to just retire the thing and build a new computer entirely.  In particular, that CPU will hold you back in some games, and replacing it with something more modern means you'd need a new processor socket, which means a new motherboard.  The new motherboard will require different memory and a new OS license.  At that point, you've replaced enough that you might as well just buy a new computer outright and either sell the old one or keep it around as a backup.
  • breadm1xbreadm1x Member UncommonPosts: 374

    Must be my harddisk then i am using a 4tb 5400rpm one and it loads just fine.

    Having a 8 year old gtx9800 with 128 shaders and 512mb now that is gonna slow u donn to a halt.

     

     


  • JaimlJaiml Member UncommonPosts: 130

    I have now upgraded the video to a GTX 750ti.  I spent a lot of time researching the best fit for what I had and I think this was it.

     

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487024&cm_re=750ti-_-14-487-024-_-Product

     

    I have to agree that this is probably the last upgrade available for this system, but is has been amazing!

     

    I am now running Archeage on High graphics with no clipping.  I have not checked the FPS but it plays great. 

     

    I tried it with all settings maxed and it would freeze every 2 or 3 minutes and then pick back up and go on but that was annoying.  I was surprised that it could do even that well but I had to back things down a bit.

     

    Huge, amazing difference.  I am very pleased.

     

    I think I have postponed a MoBo upgrade for another year or two =)

     

    As for internet speed....  I pay for upgraded download speeds so it is fast, but it is a cable provider so depends on what the rest of my neighbors are doing... early evening is not the best time!   image

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

    Glad to hear it all has worked out for now.

    Congrats. Have fun in Archeage

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