Guild Wars 2

Nuka Cola.8520:

i have a 1TB WD Black and it takes waaaay less time. Dunno whats up with yours.

Latency

The biggest problem this game has is no 64bit support. With that the game could load up shared resources and keep them in memory instead of unloading and reloading all the assets every single time. This single thing would speed up loading times for all zones that share assets. Maguuma, Kryta, Orr, Shiverpeaks, Ascalon, etc. All of the NPC’s are dressed exactly the same, the flora and fauna are exactly the same, the bad guys are exactly the same. The only thing I’d have to load is the map, scripts, other supporting things and the player data. Porting around in a zone or world area that has similar looks (shiverpeaks zones) should not have a loading screen at all in that scenario as they aren’t that big in the first place.

Bandwidth and latency are your biggest bottleneck even though loading a zone doesn’t really use much of it. The game can nearly be played on dial-up in low pop zones, wouldn’t want to do it in a large meta-event though!

I have mine installed on a usb3 flash drive with a read speed faster than my hard drives, a few minutes ago it took 20 seconds flat and 372.4Kb download to get into LA at the mystic forge. My connection never maxed, it just streamed data to me slowly (see pic).

I have an older computer that use the old HD and I still load faster than your SSD. What the heck??

Lafiel.9372:

morrolan.9608:

This doesn’t explain why loading times into LA have increased exponentially since the game launched with the same hard drive.

Try reformating your system. Over time, your system is clogged up with all sorts of questionable usages. I know for one, when I formated my laptop, previously, I was experiencing about 10-15 FPS and after format, I was running the game at ~25 FPS (quite a decent improvement) considering all I did was format. So performance does decrease significantly over time if you’re not careful with what you click.

Those days of reformatting are pretty null with anything windows xp and above. My computer is 5 years old same system and still out loads his video with a normal HD. If you have viruses, spyware/malware then yes, it may help.

Coffee.7058:

I have an older computer that use the old HD and I still load faster than your SSD. What the heck??

Latency

Lil Puppy.5216:

The biggest problem this game has is no 64bit support. With that the game could load up shared resources and keep them in memory instead of unloading and reloading all the assets every single time. This single thing would speed up loading times for all zones that share assets. Maguuma, Kryta, Orr, Shiverpeaks, Ascalon, etc. All of the NPC’s are dressed exactly the same, the flora and fauna are exactly the same, the bad guys are exactly the same. The only thing I’d have to load is the map, scripts, other supporting things and the player data. Porting around in a zone or world area that has similar looks (shiverpeaks zones) should not have a loading screen at all in that scenario as they aren’t that big in the first place.

Bandwidth and latency are your biggest bottleneck even though loading a zone doesn’t really use much of it. The game can nearly be played on dial-up in low pop zones, wouldn’t want to do it in a large meta-event though!

I have mine installed on a usb3 flash drive with a read speed faster than my hard drives, a few minutes ago it took 20 seconds flat and 372.4Kb download to get into LA at the mystic forge. My connection never maxed, it just streamed data to me slowly (see pic).

So you basically have gw2 portable ?? Now that is pretty cool bro

HarriHellYeaAmericaToTheMAX.1093:

Coffee.7058:

I have an older computer that use the old HD and I still load faster than your SSD. What the heck??

Latency

Ah, could be.

Serious.6940:

BilboBaggins.5620:

Azunai.5974:

BilboBaggins.5620:

HarriHellYeaAmericaToTheMAX.1093:

BilboBaggins.5620:

Yeah, ssd is definitely faster, I’ve noticed that myself. But i think you have another bottleneck somewhere as it takes me less than 10s to load regardless of area or server load. My rig is not top of the line, I have a 3.4ghz Intel 15 processor with 8gb of ram and a gtx600 video card. I have all my settings on max.

I assure you I dont have a bottle neck of any kind, my rig is also pretty much top of the line 3770k @ 4.5 GHz / Nvidia 680 / MSI z77a-gd65 / 16gb ram etc etc…..

It was amazing how much an SSD effected the loading times in gw2 ive never really appreciated it till when I saw the results haha.

10s for a HDD to load any part of the game regardless or server load ?? Are you sure ?? Thats one dam fine HDD you got there son

No it’s an ssd and my rig is behind yours so I’m not sure why you’re getting longer load times than me, I was even thinking about upgrading to the i7 from my i5. My only other thought is maybe I’m closer to the server than you, or am getting better routing? Do you know your ping times? I get 20-30ms for the most part.

i7 BARELY performs better than i5. Stick with it.

Good to know, thanks.

I 7 has 4 cores plus 4 part cores. Unfortunately GW2 seems to be single threaded. That means the only performance gain is the difference in clock speed. If it was fully multi-threaded then there would be a performance boost.

Azunai.5974:

Did they mention that defragging an SSD will kill it?

No it won’t. What it will do is cause extra wear for no advantage.

Old HDs use a disk that has to turn to read the next piece of information, if the data is scattered across the disk then the time taken to move between pieces builds up significantly.

Older SSDs do have an issue with writes ‘wearing’ locations, but not with reads. Each location on an SSD can only take so many writes before there is a chance it will be damaged, although this is many thousands of reads per sector. To stop this modern drives have an integral routine to mark sectors that have been written to when freed. It will then assign a new sector to the reference the OS thinks it is writing to. This massively reduces the issue but means that the computer isn’t writing to where it thinks it is. There is no way for the defrag program to make files continuous like it can on a disk. Nor is there any way to compact the programs to the fastest part of the disk, there isn’t one anyway. Because of this defragging is effectively useless and can be detrimental to the life of an SSD.

I would suggest anyone getting an SSD also switch off indexing in windows and move things like swap files to a second, normal HD. If you have enough real memory then this can be switched off completely too.

For that matter deleting data from an SSD is problematic, even with a specialist program. It will write over where it thinks the data is stored but is more than likely to miss it completely.

Good post but I wish you read all of mine. You’re saying stuff I already know/said. Thanks anyway.