I take it all back

[Old Scratch]

My load times are in the range of Exitiums. Around 7 seconds for a city hub, about 5 seconds for other little areas, if that. A new city hub does take about 10-15 seconds, but regular areas seem to be the same regardless of if I've been there or not. You guys may want to try defragging or something.

P4 2.8
1 GB PC3200 RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128

 

[Mendoza]

Based on what I've seen on other boards, memory more than everything else seems to be the main performance bottleneck. I think I'll be getting some shortly. My drive probably does need a defrag though.

 

[dojoteef]

I get really short load times as well. It's because I have 2 10K RPM SATA in a RAID 0 configuration, all things load quickly for me, including when I startup my computer, it takes a little less than thirty seconds. I think Exitium mentioned he had something similar and that he was defragmenting his harddrive as well.

 

[jannie_se_ma]

O for crying out loud, when am I going to get the damn thing?!? I hate Megarom (local distributors)... They keep on telling me it hasn't been released anywhere yet.

Wanna get it, and make time to play it, so I can continue bashing it (to all the little boys and girls: that was a JOKE, so keep the flamethrower in the backpack for now).

Hang on... did I just go an entire post without personally attacking someone? Can't be. Must have this forum confused with something else, cause that's just un-Codex like behaviour...

rant.end();

 

[Sol Invictus]

I do indeed have a pretty good set up.

It consists of 2 10k RPM SATA drives (Western Digital Caviar 120gb or somesuch) in RAID 0 configuration totalling to 223gb.

I didn't defragment my computer for over 6 months, so loading times were horrendous inside and outside of the game at first. So I read the HL2 Optimization Guide at gear.ign.com and followed the instructions to the letter. I've also freed up around 80gb of space on my hard drive (up from 3gb), defragmented it and set up a set sized page file equal to 1.5x my RAM (1024mb). Load times have since improved tremendously, at 4-6 seconds for cached saves, to a maximum of 6-12 seconds for uncached saves. Hubs take somewhat longer, at about 15 seconds the first time they're loaded, but that's not an issue.

My system:
Pentium 4 2.8c
1gb Kingston ValuRAM (not HyperX)
GEXCube ATI Radeon 9800 XT with 4.2 Beta Catalysts

Defragmenting and setting up a set size pagefile improved the performance tremendously.

 

[rob]

quick question.
this set page file option: 1.5 X is for both minimum and maximum size or just for the minumum, and maximum should be more?
thanks

 

[Sol Invictus]

Both.

 

[dojoteef]

It consists of 2 10k RPM SATA drives (Western Digital Caviar 120gb or somesuch) in RAID 0 configuration totalling to 223gb.

I don't know if you care enough, but it's highly likely that your drives are actually only 7.2K RPM drives. The WD Caviar drives only have that many RPMs. WD does make a 10K RPM SATA drive called the Raptor, with a maximum capacity of 74GB. That's the drive that I have, though I actually own 2 36GB drives instead because when I bought them a little over a year ago, they still hadn't released the 74GB drive.

Your setup is still very very nice though.

 

[Sol Invictus]

No matter. If it's running SATA with RAID 0 it's still going to be many times better than UDMA/66 or UDMA100. Since I'm running it on RAID, load times are going to be faster than a single 10k RPM hard drive anyhow. I'll take the 223gb over the 74gb any day of the week.