Quake 4 takes FOREVER to load...

[siciliano]

I really don't understand this... Quake 4 and Prey take literally 5+ minutes to load up, yet Half-Life 2 and other games only take under a minute. wtf?

My main question is - to actually LOAD a game, doesn't that just depend on CPU speed?? Maybe I'm wrong... I know I have a sh*tty graphics card, but I thought actually loading up a game had nothing to do with GPU power...plus it shouldn't be THAT bad considering I've OC'd the hell outta the GPU (it's completely stable). If it's not the GPU, how fast of a damn CPU do I need? I was pretty sure my setup is fast enough. Here are my specs:

P4 Running @ 3.1Ghz
1 GB DDR RAM
GeForce 7300GS PCI Express w/512MB RAM
(OverClocked to 600Mhz Core, and 1Ghz Memory)
Direct X 9.0c
Latest Nvidia Forceware Driver - 93.71

There's a computer fair here tomorrow, and I'm definitely getting a new graphics card (either the GeForce 8800GTS, the 8800 GTX, or one of the higher end 7950 cards.

So, what systems are you guys running these games on? And when I get the (MUCH) better graphics card, will that cut down on Load times, or do I need to actually upgrade CPU. And isn't 1 GB of RAM enough????

[Hex]

check the I/O for problems (disk). Are all the games on the same hard drive? Then check the defrag status of those big pk4s.

[siciliano]

I forgot to post HD specs.

I have a 160GB Seagate SATA HD... It's partitioned 3 times, and all my games are on a 40GB partition.

The disk is fine, everything runs perfectly on it, so it can't be that. And HL2 is on the same partition as Quake4, and it runs great...

[siciliano]

Edit: posted twice in error.

[kleeks]

hmmm perhaps this is related to your av app ?

this issue cropped up recently with someone else, and was related to the anti-virus proggy scanning the pk4's as they were accessed

(thread over on q4max forums here)

I never realised before, but it appears that theres already documented issues with the eTrust EZ Anti Virus - theres more info at the link above

[siciliano]

hmmm perhaps this is related to your av app ?

this issue cropped up recently with someone else, and was related to the anti-virus proggy scanning the pk4's as they were accessed

(thread over on q4max forums here)

I never realised before, but it appears that theres already documented issues with the eTrust EZ Anti Virus - theres more info at the link above

Dude, all I can say is, you're the fkn man! :icon14: I NEVER suspected my Real Time AV scan to be causing the problem! I do have eTrust EZ AV, and the selective exclusion setting actually didn't work, but then I tried the "snooze" option, and that did the trick -- the load time from my saved games went from like literally 5 minutes to about 30 seconds. And the load time when I first start the game drastically improved as well.

Thanks again man!

[Ganemi]

What the hell is Real Time AV? I don't have that, yet it still takes Quake 4 forever to load.

Often times it'll stop at Initializing Menu or whatever, and never load. I have to alt+enter, then alt+enter again to get the screen to go to the menu. I hate that. A lot.

[AnthonyJ]

"realtime AV" == a term for the anti-virus scanner function where they scan files for viruses as they're used, rather than a scan every x Days or whatever.

This causes problems with the .pk4 files with some virus scanners (especially the CA "eTrust Anti-Virus" software) as they are so big, and are zip files which contain other files.

Are you saying that you do not have a virus scanner?

[Ganemi]

I do. It just doesn't scan stuff as they're used, I think. *shrugs*

[AnthonyJ]

Which anti-virus program do you have? Almost all do realtime scanning...

[Ganemi]

Symantic. : [

[AnthonyJ]

Symantic? ie Norton? Yea, that does a ton of stuff all the time... practically doubled the speed of my mums PC when I uninstalled it