I was finding loading taking absolutely ages, like 5 or more minutes, back in patch 6. My system was recommended or better in most respects other than RAM, of which I only had 8GB. Once I bought more RAM, which I had been meaning to do anyway, loading speeds improved to around a minute. Which still isn’t great, and I suspect I do still have a system performance issue to get to the bottom of, but it’s a lot better than it was.
Just in case it’s useful info for someone else, thought I’d update to say that I’ve got to the bottom of one system performance issue I’ve been having with BG3. Turns out the problem was Game DVR in Windows 11 and once I followed the steps to turn it off as described at
https://appuals.com/fix-low-fps-while-gaming-windows-11/, FPS improved drastically though unfortunately not loading times.
To help anyone diagnose a similar problem, what I was seeing was terrible FPS in DirectX 11 (i.e. less than five) and okay but not stellar FPS with Vulkan (mid forties). With Game DVR turned off, Vulkan FPS increased to the mid sixties and DirectX 11 to around fifty.