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.
