Sudden longer load screens / game temporarily not responding (fix for

[duke396]

Hi, I recently had a problem that I've seen others describe in the past where my load screens were suddenly much longer than before and the blue Windows loading icon would appear (program not responding), then it would continue as usual. This added an extra 10 or more seconds to my load times, and mine are usually 3-5 seconds. Other people desribed 1 minute or more increases, and I have a reasonably good computer that I recently built. I searched through some forums for answers but didn't find anything that applied to me as most problems were corruption, mod, or ini tweak related and those with the same problem as me seemed to walk away unanswered. I found a fix that worked for me so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else is having the same problem, I hope that's okay. I haven't seen a recent thread dedicated to this problem while searching.

 

Okay so first of all this (for me at least) seems to have been a processor problem. I knew it wasn't my save because every save started doing it, I hadn't modified my ini's recently, and I checked all recently installed mods. I don't know for sure what triggered this to happen NOW and not as soon as I installed the game, but one thing I did recently do is reconfigure my RAM to run in dual channel mode instead of single, so that could have been it. I saw a response to an old post somewhere that said to change processor affinity on multicore CPUs from all cores to cores 0 and 1. That technically worked for me, it stopped the temporary freeze, but seemed to cause an FPS drop and some stuttering so it wasn't the ideal fix.

 

TL;DR: AMD's FX series processors and some Opterons, basically any multicore AMD CPU that uses Bulldozer / Piledriver chips don't always play nice with Windows 7. Microsoft has issued patches for these that aren't perfect but do help in certain aspects. If you are NOT running one of the specified AMD processors this fix will not help you and may actually hurt you if it will even install so know your hardware, open Computer Properties to check if you aren't sure. Windows 8 should have these fixes built in IIRC.

 

Here is the scheduling tweak (this seems to have fixed my problem by itself): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594/en-us

And here is the core parking tweak (I've HEARD this one can actually decrease performance so I haven't tried it myself): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060

 

Remember to create a restore point before installing one or both of these because they cannot be uninstalled and are described as "not fully tested" by Microsoft.

 

I hope this helps someone out.

 

Edit: Well the forum seems to have cut off some of my title and I can't edit it so... Hmm.

Edited January 22, 2014 by duke396