Anyway to make game load faster with tons of mods (dumb question i know)

[DjinnKiller]

The loading times of FO4 is not susceptible to magic, black or otherwise.

Two factors heavily influences your LT.

One, your hardware (the biggest one).

Two, frame rate (after you get the hardware above a certain level).

I run a setup with around 170 mods, some of them are fairly heavy texture mods, I typically load around 6-7GB of VRAM.

My loading times, loading a save or new areas typically resides in the 5-30 sec range.

As another poster here said, the loading is dependent on frame rate . How much of a difference you'll actually notice depends on your hardware.

I disable the frame rate manually between load screens, and have FO4 installed on RAID0/Stripe Set with two Samsung 970 PRO 1TB NVMe SSD's.

(With a RTX2080Ti and a 2950X Threadripper).

Depending on what it loads the FR mostly fluctuates in the 700-950 range during load (some low valleys in the 300 range, and some peaks in the 1000-1200 range)

And then there is the engine, even with the FR removed I hit a bottleneck because the engine can't fully utilize hardware above a certain level.

I even loaded most parts of the game into a RAMdisk, and it didn't change the LT from my RAID0......

So, fast hardware will get you to good LTs (when removing the frame capper), but then, above a certain point you hit a wall.

EDIT:

This is with Windows 10 1909 64-bit, and with Windows Defender with stock settings.

Disabling anti-malware software will not increase your load times, but it will make your computer less secure.

Edited December 7, 2019 by DjinnKiller

[HeyYou]

 

The loading times of FO4 is not susceptible to magic, black or otherwise.

Two factors heavily influences your LT.

One, your hardware (the biggest one).

Two, frame rate (after you get the hardware above a certain level).

I run a setup with around 170 mods, some of them are fairly heavy texture mods, I typically load around 6-7GB of VRAM.

My loading times, loading a save or new areas typically resides in the 5-30 sec range.

As another poster here said, the loading is dependent on frame rate . How much of a difference you'll actually notice depends on your hardware.

I disable the frame rate manually between load screens, and have FO4 installed on RAID0/Stripe Set with two Samsung 970 PRO 1TB NVMe SSD's.

(With a RTX2080Ti and a 2950X Threadripper).

Depending on what it loads the FR mostly fluctuates in the 700-950 range during load (some low valleys in the 300 range, and some peaks in the 1000-1200 range)

And then there is the engine, even with the FR removed I hit a bottleneck because the engine can't fully utilize hardware above a certain level.

I even loaded most parts of the game into a RAMdisk, and it didn't change the LT from my RAID0......

So, fast hardware will get you to good LTs (when removing the frame capper), but then, above a certain point you hit a wall.

EDIT:

This is with Windows 10 1909 64-bit, and with Windows Defender with stock settings.

Disabling anti-malware software will not increase your load times, but it will make your computer less secure.

 

Even loading from a RAM drive didn't make that much difference? That's disappointing.... Guess I won't spend the money to upgrade to 128 gb of Ram then. :D

 

If you are playing a single player game, and have nothing else running, then your anti-virus is irrelevant. Back in the day, when the game engine REALLY beat the crap out of hardware, disabling the a/v would actually make a performance difference. On todays hardware, probably not so much. I just leave defender running, as it really doesn't have any impact on game performance at all.

 

i7 9700KF

16 gb ram

GTX 1060 6gb vid card.

 

Game runs from a 500gb Crucial Solid State drive. O/S is installed on the 500gb m2 drive.

 

And yeah, the game engine has not caught up with modern hardware. It can barely make use of two CPU cores...... so, for these games, clock speed is more important than the number of cores.

Edited December 10, 2019 by HeyYou

[DjinnKiller]

 

If you are playing a single player game, and have nothing else running, then your anti-virus is irrelevant. Back in the day, when the game engine REALLY beat the crap out of hardware, disabling the a/v would actually make a performance difference. On todays hardware, probably not so much. I just leave defender running, as it really doesn't have any impact on game performance at all.

 

.........

 

And yeah, the game engine has not caught up with modern hardware. It can barely make use of two CPU cores...... so, for these games, clock speed is more important than the number of cores.

 

 

Amen brother! :smile:

 

I've been playing games for 40 years (Atari, VIC20, ZX81/ZX Spectrum, CP/M based computers anyone?), and I can't remember the last time I disabled anti-malware software on a Windows PC, maybe back in the early days of Win 95, Win 98 and Win XP......?

 

Regarding load times, yeah, my RAID0 with a sequential read speed of around 6.5 GB/s vs RAMdisk didn't make much of a difference.

(Would be cool to test with a couple of more NVMe's in the stripe set though :devil: ).

Edited December 13, 2019 by DjinnKiller

[StormWolf01]

Off topic, but I actually remember putting my hands on a PONG deck, in a thrift store, when I was somewhere between 4 to 6 years old. Atari 2600, 5200, (damned controllers always breaking) I had the nintendo, my best friend had the sega. Ohhhh yeah, those were the days.

Edited December 13, 2019 by StormWolf01

[DjinnKiller]

Off topic, but I actually remember putting my hands on a PONG deck, in a thrift store, when I was somewhere between 4 to 6 years old. Atari 2600, 5200, (damned controllers always breaking) I had the nintendo, my best friend had the sega. Ohhhh yeah, those were the days.

I remember those..... fondly, and this thread is rapidly dissolving into a trip down memory lane! :)

 

Thanks StormWolf01, and we are probably gonna get nuked by the hammer of the ban, this is going way off-topic.....fast.

[HeyYou]

 

Off topic, but I actually remember putting my hands on a PONG deck, in a thrift store, when I was somewhere between 4 to 6 years old. Atari 2600, 5200, (damned controllers always breaking) I had the nintendo, my best friend had the sega. Ohhhh yeah, those were the days.

I remember those..... fondly, and this thread is rapidly dissolving into a trip down memory lane! :smile:

 

Thanks StormWolf01, and we are probably gonna get nuked by the hammer of the ban, this is going way off-topic.....fast.

 

Oddly enough, on EVERY forum I have participated in, threads ALWAYS go off topic. I had begun to think that it was an unwritten rule somewhere. :D Or, maybe it's just human nature.

[Rooker75]

Some mods and some uncommon combinations of multiple mods can mysteriously have an outsized impact on load times. On my previous PC, there were two mods that, if both were active, added over a minute to game load time. Disable either of them and the problem went away. I never did figure out how to fix that and just removed one of them.

 

In terms of hardware, the biggest possible impact will be to use an SSD. Even a slow, SATA-based SSD is a giant upgrade over a spinning hard drive. I'm using an NVME SSD now and I go from desktop to ingame in about 30 - 40 seconds. Following the instructions on the Texture Optimization Project and packing as many textures as possible into ba2s will also have an enormous impact.

 

Exclude your game folders from your virus scanner.

 

This is especially true for Windows Defender. My new PC was hanging up launching several different games and excluding the entire Steam folder from Defender solved that problem.

 

Disabling anti-malware software will not increase your load times, but it will make your computer less secure.

This is incorrect, it has a direct impact on numerous games. Although the game folders should be excluded from the security software rather than disabling the software altogether.

Edited December 16, 2019 by Rooker75

[DjinnKiller]

 

 

 

Disabling anti-malware software will not increase your load times, but it will make your computer less secure.

This is incorrect, it has a direct impact on numerous games. Although the game folders should be excluded from the security software rather than disabling the software altogether.

 

Nowhere in my original post did I mention "numerous games".

 

In the context of this discussion, and with the hardware and settings discussed here, Windows Defender has zero impact on load times of FO4.

[metaphorset]

Disabling anti-malware software will not increase your load times, but it will make your computer less secure.

This is incorrect, it has a direct impact on numerous games.

 

From a technical standpoint (as in "having worked in the field of IT and IT security for 25 years") that doesn't make much sense (anymore, if you are not using ancient anti-malware protection tech).

 

<grandpavoice>

In ye olden times, anti-malvare software was doing its thing whenever it felt like doing it. It simply ignored any other activity and put an additional heap of load on your system (especially the harddrive IO) by performing scheduled scans (I am looking at you, Yellow Plague...). That's even a big no-no if you just browse the internet but even more so, if you play games.

 

At this point manufacturers ran in circles for a bit, because they came up with the idea that they'd do their scanning business only in idle times. But that's exactly what enabled the spread of some of the most famous worms that would replicate via e-mail (I am looking at you, Outlook Express).

 

That's when some manufacturers finally started to look at an approach that already existed in the FLOSS world for almost a decade (e.g. AppArmor) and started monitoring processes, system loads and file creation at the same time (I am looking at you, F-Secure).

</grandpavoice>

 

If you want to have prove about whether or not your antivirus creates too much load on your system, you might want to use one of the many stress test suites, that are capable to create a high rw io load on your system. Make one run with and a second run without your antimalware software and you'll see how much of an impact it has.

 

The biggest file IO-related bottleneck I encounter quite frequently stems from the bad habit of using the hdd/ssd space up to over 75%. Whether you are using a electro-mechanical data storage device or a brand-new ssd, data fragmentation is still a thing. If the available free unfragmented space is smaller than the biggest files (I am looking at you, ESP and BA2), they are going to stay fragmented no matter how many times you run defrag.

Edited December 18, 2019 by metaphorset

[dark47]

This is all good info, but, with my game anyway, I notice that the amount of mods I use seems to have the biggest impact on loading times. Playing with no mods (which is torture now that I see the difference in gameplay), I have no problem with my game and load times aren't worth mentioning. My current game uses around 75 mods and I have long load times and the occasion drop to desktop (which is what it feels like - I may be running through the wasteland one second and the next I'm looking at my desktop). It seems that a good number of mods for me is around 50. I experience no real load time waits and no drops.

 

Windows 10 X-64 Home

Intel I7-8700 CPU 3.2 Ghz

16 gig Ram

Nvidea Gtx 1050 4 Gig VRam

225 Gig SSD (Operating system and Fallout 4)

1T HHD (all other programs and data)

 

Fallout 4 runs very well and looks good. The more mods I add, the more little irritations I find. Load Accelerator helps some with load times - nothing great, but every little bit helps. If this were anything but Fallout 4 (which has me addicted) I wouldn't mess with it.