S.T.A.L.K.E.R. load time question

[Koeryn]

I recently nabbed STALKER (SoC and CoP) from steam, and have come across a huge problem. Obscenely long load times.

At first I thought it was just crashing, but I figured I would step back, take a nap, and see what happened.

40 minutes later (seriously, this is NOT hyperbole. It took about 40 minutes), the opening cinematic began. I woke up about a half hour after I left it, checked on it, then waited another ten minutes.

ANY ideas what could cause this? I'm on THIS:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220744

Laptop. Before you go biting my head off 'bout gaming on a laptop and placing my problem 100% at that fact, I can play Left 4 Dead with NO trouble, Half Life 2, with no trouble, Mirror's Edge with only minor lag, Portal the same, and UT2k4, etc. It's only STALKER that's giving me trouble, and once I'm in game, it runs just as smoothly as the others. It's just the loading screens that take forever.

So, any help?

 

[randomsix]

I can only imagine that the issue is your hard drive, as I've never had loading times of more than a minute with those games.

 

[oplinger]

Laptop. Before you go biting my head off 'bout gaming on a laptop and placing my problem 100% at that fact, I can play Left 4 Dead with NO trouble, Half Life 2, with no trouble, Mirror's Edge with only minor lag, Portal the same, and UT2k4, etc. It's only STALKER that's giving me trouble, and once I'm in game, it runs just as smoothly as the others. It's just the loading screens that take forever.

So, any help?

It's common for laptop processors to have their power slashed by a good 30%. But I wouldn't blame that for the long loads.

But i will say all the games you listed are MUCH easier to run than STALKER.

HL2, Portal, and L4D run on the source engine, which is highly optimized because valve is awesome.

UT2K4 is actually pretty well optimized too, it's also nothing amazing by today's standards (though back in 2004..)

The X-ray engine on the other hand, is somewhat cludgy (but god it's sexy <.<). Have you tried lowering the settings to the lowest settings? That should decrease load times by a fair amount, if not, it's a hardware issue. CoP should be easier to run than SoC though, they made a lot of updates.

 

[skennedy929]

First off, I play this game on a dedicated 128mb card, and I can't use anything above 1280x720, static lighting, and medium-high settings. You also have a slow 5400rpm HDD so that might not help either.

The X-ray engine is much more demanding than Source and isn't nearly as well optimized. You might need to go bottom barrel settings to make it run correctly.

 

[Koeryn]

Laptop. Before you go biting my head off 'bout gaming on a laptop and placing my problem 100% at that fact, I can play Left 4 Dead with NO trouble, Half Life 2, with no trouble, Mirror's Edge with only minor lag, Portal the same, and UT2k4, etc. It's only STALKER that's giving me trouble, and once I'm in game, it runs just as smoothly as the others. It's just the loading screens that take forever.

So, any help?

It's common for laptop processors to have their power slashed by a good 30%. But I wouldn't blame that for the long loads.

But i will say all the games you listed are MUCH easier to run than STALKER.

HL2, Portal, and L4D run on the source engine, which is highly optimized because valve is awesome.

UT2K4 is actually pretty well optimized too, it's also nothing amazing by today's standards (though back in 2004..)

The X-ray engine on the other hand, is somewhat cludgy (but god it's sexy <.<). Have you tried lowering the settings to the lowest settings? That should decrease load times by a fair amount, if not, it's a hardware issue. CoP should be easier to run than SoC though, they made a lot of updates.

The game itself doesn't lag at all, it runs nice and smoothly. It's only the load times that are long. I cut off the pre-loading objects and that reduced the loading times. Still long, but it works. =p

 

[oplinger]

It's definitely a hard drive issue then.

If the game runs smoothly, then all the other components are fine (everything is loaded into RAM) but if the loading screens and such are long, (moving from the HD to RAM) then it has to be the hard drive. I'd get it checked out.

 

[P-mac]

The STALKER X-ray engine has always been notoriously demanding. My suggestion is to set all the settings to low (especially lighting). If that doesn't help, I've heard of a mod that supposedly helps optimize the game and make it run smoother (don't know the name of the mod). You might want to try that out.

 

[oplinger]

The STALKER X-ray engine has always been notoriously demanding. My suggestion is to set all the settings to low (especially lighting). If that doesn't help, I've heard of a mod that supposedly helps optimize the game and make it run smoother (don't know the name of the mod). You might want to try that out.

Thats because X-Ray was made in 2001 and is not properly multi-threaded. It uses 1 and a half core.

That would be really useful if a computer could only use half the core.

The X-ray engine is not even close to "not properly multi-threaded" it is incapable of multi-threading.

 

[Starke]

Stupid question, but have you checked the fragmentation of the install? It's possible Steam fragmented it all over the drive and that could play hell with loading.

 

[oplinger]

It is capable.Shadow of Chernobyl patch 1.004 (I think, or was it 1.003 or 1.001?) introduced at least a little multi threding. One core is used almost completely. Thats the graphical part. The second core is used about 40-50%. Thats the AI core. But this is not enough for such a demanding game. Thats why STALKER makes most people's GPUs cry in pain.

Nope, they improved a lot of what the engine does, like graphical performance, and in X-ray 1.5 they added ALOT of improvements, but still no multithreading.

It's actually a reason people left GSC game world to create 4A games (Metro 2033) the 4A engine does support multi-threading, they claim it's something the X-ray engine was incapable of doing.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/53175/Metro-2033-Dev-We-Do-Not-Use-S-T-A-L-K-E-R-X-Ray-Engine-Components

 

[oplinger]

It is capable.Shadow of Chernobyl patch 1.004 (I think, or was it 1.003 or 1.001?) introduced at least a little multi threding. One core is used almost completely. Thats the graphical part. The second core is used about 40-50%. Thats the AI core. But this is not enough for such a demanding game. Thats why STALKER makes most people's GPUs cry in pain.

Nope, they improved a lot of what the engine does, like graphical performance, and in X-ray 1.5 they added ALOT of improvements, but still no multithreading.

It's actually a reason people left GSC game world to create 4A games (Metro 2033) the 4A engine does support multi-threading, they claim it's something the X-ray engine was incapable of doing.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/53175/Metro-2033-Dev-We-Do-Not-Use-S-T-A-L-K-E-R-X-Ray-Engine-Components

I know... im the creator of the Metro 2033 group...
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Metro-2033
But im sure that the engine uses at least a little of the second core. I have a i5 750 and when I CNTRL ALT DELETE it says the game is using a core and 2/10
Also... 4A engine is KICKASS!!@!@#11!

...Alright, I'll leave you to believe what you will.

Except for believing that the 4A engine is kick ass. No need to believe that. It's a fact >.>

 

[skennedy929]

The STALKER X-ray engine has always been notoriously demanding. My suggestion is to set all the settings to low (especially lighting). If that doesn't help, I've heard of a mod that supposedly helps optimize the game and make it run smoother (don't know the name of the mod). You might want to try that out.

The mod is called Oblivion Lost, and it does indeed fix a lot of the skipping and pausing in-game, it also adds support for newer graphical features and actually kills my frame-rate a bit.

In fact, if you've played the original game and loved it Oblivion Lost really makes it even more awesome.

 

[P-mac]

The STALKER X-ray engine has always been notoriously demanding. My suggestion is to set all the settings to low (especially lighting). If that doesn't help, I've heard of a mod that supposedly helps optimize the game and make it run smoother (don't know the name of the mod). You might want to try that out.

The mod is called Oblivion Lost, and it does indeed fix a lot of the skipping and pausing in-game, it also adds support for newer graphical features and actually kills my frame-rate a bit.

In fact, if you've played the original game and loved it Oblivion Lost really makes it even more awesome.

I wasn't thinking of Oblivion, but that would work too. Oblivion is pretty fun and adds a lot to vanilla STALKER.

 

[Sjakie]

one whole page of replies and nobody asked the obvious but obligated question:

Did you update your hardware drivers to its latest versions?

 

[octafish]

Laptop HDD combined with fragmented files would be my guess, max speed of a laptop is mostly 5400rpm usually lower. Though there are a couple of 7200rpm laptop drives and of course a SDD will fit in a laptop nicely.