Long loading times

[Garnier]

My brother's computer which is nearly as fast as my own does not have this issue, the loading is quick (just ~5 seconds usually). It's not the computer being slow. It's not even a long loading time actually, it's a long delay before the loading begins.

[uk_john]

I have a 4850 ATI and the red loading bar take 3-5 MINUTES to load a strategic or tactical map! This despite whatever resolution I set the game or my desktop I have ended all the services, like firewall, etc and still the same! It even takes that long if i just Escape to save and then click on 'Return to game'!!!!!!!!!!!!

[The Unknown Guy]

I'm having a simmilar problem in my asus. Which is of course an improvement over the last time I tried to install MTW in it.

I sort of wonder if it's due to the external dvd drive.

[caravel]

I now suspect that this problem is somehow related to ATI HyperMemory. It mainly seems to affect the newer PCI-E, X1xxx and HD series cards.

I ran some tests yesterday by rebooting with restricted system memory. I restricted the system RAM from it's 2GB through 512MB and 256MB right down to 128MB and the loading bar delay was reduced to about 20 seconds from the usual 2 minutes, but the game was obviously unplayably slow due to lack of RAM and severe swapping to disk. I also tested running on a single CPU core and that didn't make any difference.

This could be seen as evidence of "the more system RAM you have, the worse it gets", but I think it goes further than this. Personally I have a hunch that it's the hypermemory area allocated by the ATI driver that is somehow causing the slow loading problem with MTW (which is probably quite simply incompatible with it for whatever reason). The less system RAM you have, the less hypermemory can be allocated. In theory hypermemory should cause a problem as it's not a fixed reserve, but more a of a dynamic maximum available.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like it can be disabled or adjusted in any way - hence the problem.

I had a similar problem some years back with an Nvidia card (a 7300GT), though that was an AGP card (running in my old motherboard). I seem to remember that reducing the AGP aperture down to the minimum reduced the loading delay significantly, but I don't think it eliminated it. So it seems probable that MTW has issues with AGP Texture Acceleration/HyperMemory on certain newer graphics cards, but not with Nvidia's TurboCache?

Interestingly MTW has the AGP slider in the video options, I've never seen this make much difference, but it's absent from Shogun and that does not have this issue at all. I would guess that something CA added to the game, regarding this AGP slider, is tripping this fault.

[Wytchfynder]

I suspect Asai is onto something there. Over the years Ive owned a variety of pcs and laptops. Some would play Med1 fine, alas most wouldnt. I been hit with that Nvidia uncontrollable unit stuff which I see still remains unfixed/unpatched.
My main gaming comp pre 2009 was P4 3ghz 2gb ram, winxp and ati HD2400pro which played most games fine. Med1 though had an extremely long wait, 5 minutes, before anything started to load up and the comp sounded like it was in pain. The red bar when it did appear took maybe only 10 seconds but then was a 50/50 gamble whether it carried on or crashed.

[Garnier]

A development:

My brother recently upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. He was having this same long loading time problem. Actually he's using the same hardware I posted at the top of this thread:
A64 FX-55 2.6ghz
2GB 667mhz RAM
X1900XT

After installing Windows 7 (64 bit), we installed MTW. And the long loading time problem is gone. The red bar starts filling instantly and only takes 5-10 seconds to finish.

Also interesting: the first time he ran the game, we hadn't actually installed it, I simply copied the game from my computer. So it had the same settings as I use on mine, including 1280x1024 campaign map res. It actually loaded the campaign map fine and seemed to be working, apart from problems with the mods I had.

Then after he installed it fresh from the discs, it crashes when he runs any campaign map res above 800x600. This is fishy, because obviously 1280x1024 CAN work on his computer as evidenced by our first try. Some other setting combined with that must be causing the crash!

I still am on XP with a similar machine (including X1900XT), and still getting the long loading times. I tried disabling ATI Shared Memory in ATI Traytools but that didn't change anything for me.

[caravel]

Still looks like an AGP/PCI-E driver or GART issue. AGP or PCI-E cards?

XP had some AGP issues, mostly with Nvidia drivers, which have been fixed in Vista/7.