Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga How long are the PC version loading times?

On a decent PC? Do they take ages like on the 360?

No

About 20 seconds on average with my PC.

Well my pc is not top spec and it loads really fast for me. Very little waiting time.

On my middle range (to low range) PC, it's small enough, I can't tell exactly, but less than 20 seconds, probably less than 10.

I have a pretty fast PC. I don't remember loading times ever being an issue when I played, maybe at the most, 3 seconds.

Funny that, I always thought my HDD performance was poor but nothing seems to improve. Maybe it#s just a naff raid controller. The games run from a WD Raptor 10,000 RPM HDD so they should be quick. The PC has 8Gb RAM and a quad core CPU.

Up to 5 seconds for me (on a 6-disk RAID-0 partition). It may not sound like much but it's really slow compared to other games I play.

But that's the price us PC gamers have to pay as a result of the console market. For example, the original Crysis was the ultimate benchmark for PC gaming, but Crysis-2 was just a cheap console port - after all, what PC gamer would want to play Crysis without the sandbox/island area (which was dropped in Crysis 2 because consoles just couldn't handle the memory requirements)?

The real problem is that even a basic modern PC leaves the (5 year old) XBox 360/PS3 for dead. But as long as the console market is more lucrative than the PC market, us PC gamers aren't going to see any real improvements until Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo finally get off their arses and start producing consoles with proper modern hardware. And lets face it - so far only Nintendo has announced a hardware upgrade, and only because they were already so far behind on the previous generation.

I hate to say it, but PC gaming might be dead, or at least irrevocably tied-in to obsolete console hardware. Gaming has become more 'mainstream' in recent years, but this just means its become cheaper, not better.

Remember how Larian cited technical reasons as to why they couldn't allow dragons in DKS to attack ground troops? All those technical reasons were due to '360 support (e.g. ridiculously low available RAM), not PC limitations, and these kind of excuses are just going to get worse as time goes on.

Well, who has such a thing, actually ?

Personally I don't believe that too many gamers have 6 discs built in ...

But I do know many gamers who have SSDs rather than my 6*7200RPM HDDs - and even with 6*HDDs, you're not getting close to an SSD RAID performance...

I agree, only real PC enthusiasts have setups like that as it does improve performance. However the majority of gamers have a single HDD setup. Downside of RAID 0 is good performance but if one of the drives fails you loose the whole volume. If I were setting up a high spec PC & had the room for 6 drives I'd choose RAID 5 as it gives performance with redundancy.

I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore PC user but I do have 2 500gb drives mirrored as I'm fed up of HDD failures and the incovenience of a re-install of everything. The games run from a 300GB WD Raptor single drive which is connected to the same controller as the system drive. The 10K RPM hdd did make a difference in my old PC but not in my new one. Must be a controller issue.

True, but only my install/save volume is RAID-0 (I have a RAID-5 system partition). And all RAID-0 partitions are backed up daily when I shut-down my PC. But I admit, it's probably only a small performance increase for a significant effort. But my next gaming-rig will be built on SSDs (I've recently discovered from my gaming friends just how fast a 3-4 disk SSD RAID is...).

How many hard drives do you have in total and more to the point how big is your PC case?
As for SSD's, not tried one myself but everyone says they offer phenonemal performance. I will fit one to my next PC as the prices will have come down by then. One of the guys at work is a serious PC gamer and has a setup with multiple SSD's.

With the gap between PCs and consoles widening, hopefully the people writing game engines start designing them to be more scaleable from the ground up, so PC versions don't get held back too much by console support.

I'll probably put an SSD in my next PC, but prices will have to come down a lot before I start using them with RAID.

Since removing the intro videos in the game directory, I'm in game within 5 seconds of clicking the shortcut.

I thought only EA did unskippable videos.