Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems How long does the initial loading time take?

First off, I'm enjoying the game so far. Thanks Larian!

Due to space issues on my pc, I had to install the game onto a SSHD. (I'll probably be moving it to a SSD / NVME drive this weekend though).
But before I do that, I'm curious how long its taking people to load into the game.

Once the game itself launches, I'm seeing a pretty quick load into the main menu. When I hit 'continue' (my single player game), it takes approx ~2 minutes to load in sometimes. it usually appears to hang around the 60% and 80% marks, though if I had to guess this is an arbitrary progress bar updating after X event occurs to X%. (I have done progress bars same way, so not knocking it if thats the case). But my point is that it feels like it takes quite a long time to load into the game after selecting 'continue campaign'.

Now, for reference, if I load a save after that point, the load-in process is pretty quick, less than a minute I'd guess. But I'm sure part of that is already having many of the assets loaded.
I'm sure my times will improve when I move to the SSD, but I am curious what other people are experiencing.

For reference, here is my PC build:

MoBo : Asus x570 TUF PLUS (Wifi)
CPU : AMD R5 3600
RAM : 16GB DDR4 3600MHZ
GPU : MSI 2070 Armor OC
SSHD: Seagate 2TB SSHD ST2000DX001 Supposedly 7200 RPM w/ 8GB ssd cache

EDIT: Took time measurements below, just so anyone in future can see times between different drive types:

| DRIVE TYPE | Loading What? | Time (seconds) |
| SSHD | Launch Game -> Main Menu | 42s | Pretty snappy I think.
| | Press Continue -> Loaded In | 62s | Note that textures were popping in for about 30s after the game began initial rendering here.
| | Load saved in different area | 36s | After multiple tests, this is about the average I saw. WIth texture details popping in about 10-15s after initial render.

I'll update the above table if/when I move to an SSD or NVME.

Load times for me have been taking 5 minutes or more lately, and I'm not sure why. The game just sits there on the loading screen with the load bar completely empty for several minutes.

So I just moved the installation from my SSHD to a Gen3 NVME drive, and (as expected) the load times were better.

From the moment I saw the 'loading bar' to the main menu was 10.2s. (Note that the load bar shows up after the skippable larian / nvidia logos, I had skipped nvidia logo once it popped up).

Pressing continue brought my loaded into the Shattered Sanctum. It took 26s to drop off the loading screen, then around 2.5s for the initial render, and another 2.5s or so for the final texture to load in. so thats a 50% improvement in loading time. (62 -> 31s)

Subsequent loading was approximately 28-30s, so a negligible improvement over the SSHD test. this included loading a different area altogether (went from sanctum to chapel entrance), and reloading saves multiple times in a row. All of these tests had zero texture-load-in after the fact (whereas the first time booting the game up had to load in higher detailed textures. And while it was playable around the same time as the SSHD, the textures on the SSHD took about 10-15s to fully load in. So if thats what you care about, it can be considered a large improvement of about 33%).


More readable values going from SSHD to NVME:
50-75% improvement on game boot.
50% improvement-ish on initial loading of save game
16% improvement on loading save games after initial load. If you include the HD-texture-loading that occurs after initial rendering in this stat, it was actually 33-40% improvement.

These improvement numbers will likely be more exaggerated if you play on a standard HDD and not an SSHD.