Loading time

[Atomcreator]

CK3 takes 7 minutes to load and always has.
I have the Throne room but no mods.
Core i5 2,5Ghz, 8GB, GTX950M with 4GB VRam.
Any reason its so slow ?

 

[Spaninq]

CK3 takes 7 minutes to load and always has.
I have the Throne room but no mods.
Core i5 2,5Ghz, 8GB, GTX950M with 4GB Ram.
Any reason its so slow ?

7 minutes sounds like a lot.

I actually have the same video card, but I have an i7 processor (at 2.4 GHz) and 8 GB of RAM.

My experience is that it usually takes my laptop 1-2 minutes to load CK3, although that's with the game being on an SSD.


Maybe your laptop only has a HDD for storage, which I remember being considerably slower than SSD storage?
Alternatively, upgrading 4 GBs of RAM to 8 GB should be doable on most laptops and might help.


Actually, Minimum Specifications on the Steam Page says 6 GB of RAM, so upgrading your RAM should definitely help.

 

[The Shacks]

4gig of ram does sound way too small for anything modern to be fair. 16 is always best but 8 is a happy medium. Also as the previous fella said if your still living in the stone age with non SSD storage that will slow things down. can always see who doesent have SSD when loading into multiplayer games, it really makes a difference. (Price of SSDs have shot down tbf, even normies splash out on terrabite SSDs thesedays)

 

[ThatDaniel]

Core i5 2,5Ghz, 8GB, GTX950M with 4GB Ram.

So you have 8 GB of RAM and 4GB of VRAM? That is above minimum spec.

Could be CPU as that is below minimum spec.

If you only have a HDD then that might also be the issue, otherwise i don't think anything else would make your game load that slow especially with no mods.

 

[Atomcreator]

So you have 8 GB of RAM and 4GB of VRAM? That is above minimum spec.

Could be CPU as that is below minimum spec.

If you only have a HDD then that might also be the issue, otherwise i don't think anything else would make your game load that slow especially with no mods.

Yes, its 8GB RAM and 4GB VRAM ( edited )
I'm at a loss

 

[m0xxY]

It's probably the lack of SSD.

 

[sreckom92]

It's probably the lack of SSD.

My SSD died recently, and I had to switch to using my HDD for CK3.
Load times increased from 20 seconds to 2 minutes.
Those 2 minutes aren't great, but it's surely far from 7 minutes.
I do have 16GB of RAM, but I've never seen vanilla CK3 use anywhere near 8 GB of RAM.

Maybe it's a faulty HDD?

 

[fcc56]

Just to chime in, all the parts in the original post are pretty old; the GTX950M is from 2015. 2.5 GHz is fairly slow for an i5, and so on. Meeting the minimum specs doesn't necessarily mean it will run well. The HDD would also slow things down as others have mentioned.
Checking this morning the time from clicking the Resume button in the launcher to being in the game was less than two minutes, with the game at 1349 with an 867 start.

For reference here's the RAM usage; like many games CK3 will take more than the minimum spec if it's available:

 

[fcc56]

Just to follow up, this is after playing for a few hours. Note that (in simplified terms) the "Commit" value is how much memory (RAM + paging file + some other stuff) the OS is making available to the game and the "Working Set" value is generally speaking how much physical memory (RAM) is being used. It's more complex than that, but that's the gist.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

Is the game on a HDD or SSD? Load time is primarily determined by the read speed of your hard drive.

 

[Atomcreator]

It'll be the HDD then. Although other games don't seem to take as long as this. Shame I'm skint as can't afford to replace my 5 year old laptop.

 

[The Shacks]

It'll be the HDD then. Although other games don't seem to take as long as this. Shame I'm skint as can't afford to replace my 5 year old laptop.

You may balk at this lad but a couple of years ago my PC died and I was working a s** job and I was skint and I got a Dell alienware on finance, paying 60 a month for a year or something, I forget, was £1300 all together. Paid it off quick as you like now I have a top of the range PC. They do really decent deals on them, can even get a paypall credit for it which has really sound and fair rates on it, can even pay it off interest free if you do it quick enough. Good gaming PC is an investment thats worth it

Edit: Not to mention, whatever you think about them and their 'price' Alienwares are built to last. Always a good investment in terms of how long it will hold up and stay competitive.

 

[Atomcreator]

I've been here for 21 years nearly now. Maybe PDX do a long service award

 

[Spaninq]

It'll be the HDD then. Although other games don't seem to take as long as this. Shame I'm skint as can't afford to replace my 5 year old laptop.

You could get an external SSD, transfer the game files to it, connect via USB 3, and have a decently better experience. It's what I did for a few years before I finally bought a laptop with SSDs included (actually I think I only had a USB 2.0, iirc). You just have to be careful with the SSD and its connector when transporting it around. Looking around, 1 TB of SSD goes for less than $100, which isn't cheap, but considerably cheaper than a new laptop.

 

[The Shacks]

^ Million times cheaper than it used to be. The fact you can get essentially unlimited solid state memory for £80 is pretty bloody amazing.

 

[fcc56]

It's also entirely possible to replace the internal HDD with an internal SSD. The SSD manufacturers offer free downloadable apps for cloning the old drive to the new one so the transition is fairly painless. The biggest hassle would be getting the new and the old drives connected at the same time since it's a laptop—you'd probably need an external SATA drive connector. You could also temporarily connect both drives to a desktop PC and do it that way.

And just in passing, note that on a performance per £ basis, a desktop is vastly less expensive than a laptop, by a factor of as much as 2x depending on the build.

But I understand your position—I've been on an austerity budget myself for the past two and a half years.

 

[Atomcreator]

You could get an external SSD, transfer the game files to it, connect via USB 3, and have a decently better experience. It's what I did for a few years before I finally bought a laptop with SSDs included (actually I think I only had a USB 2.0, iirc). You just have to be careful with the SSD and its connector when transporting it around. Looking around, 1 TB of SSD goes for less than $100, which isn't cheap, but considerably cheaper than a new laptop.

Thats a good idea thanks.