The Witcher: improving your load/save times :)

Nenu

Nenu

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Apr 28, 2007
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Hi all
if anyone is suffering long load or save times in The Witcher, I've found something that should help.
My save/load game times were previously between 40 seconds and 1:30 mins !!
Now they are around 20 seconds.


1) The save files are placed on drive C: which gets fragmented a lot and the free space is usually fragmented too.
You can either defragment the free space or leave a lot of free space so new saves dont get fragmented as much, making saving and loading faster.
If you have access to a tool that defragments free space, that should help too although I havent used one.

2) The Windows swap file is placed on drive C: by default, notably the same drive as the save games.
For those with 2GB ram or less (My system uses up to 2.5GB space while playing), this will mean that while saves are loading, to free memory, the swapfile will be populated at the same time. This will result in a large drop in hard drive transfer rate for each process.
To fix this, put the swapfile on your next fastest hard drive.
Be sure to defragment the drive before doing this so the swapfile isnt fragmented onto the hard drive.


To sum up:
1) Defrag drive C: including free space for best effect or leave lots of free space.
2) Move the swapfile to your next fastest drive, defrag it before doing so.
Be sure that its not another partition on the same drive!


The upcoming 1.2 patch will address load/save times but its not known how well this will work yet.
The above tips will also help after the 1.2 patch is applied.
If you have any other tips on how to speed up the load/save times in the Witcher, please post them here.
Let us know if this helps you :)

Cheers
 
I think you are right about configuring your computer so it has the swap file on a seperate physical hard drive. Defragging will certainly help too. I always defrag the hard drive with my installed programs before and after installations (Again, seperate pyhsical drive than the OS and the swap file). O&O Defrag is a great util but the built in windows defrag does an ok job if you dont have a good 3rd party defrag util available.

I have been playing The Witcher a bit and I have heard a lot of people experience crazy long load times as you mentioned. I havent timed how long load times take but I would estimate around 20-30secs.. Still takes a while but it's definately better than the 1:30 wait times! :eek:
 
Unfortunately there is only so much you can do. My load times are anywhere between 5 and 40 seconds (including auto-saving), but outside of some very serious patching or a complete engine overhaul, the problems with loading are really attributed to the fact it occurs so often. A 40 second load wouldn't be bad if you weren't subjected to it again on the way back out. Simply caching the previous area could probably knock total loading times TO a third.

Something tells me the saving mechanics could be further streamlined, as after disc maintenance is addressed the auto-saves can nearly double 'loading' time. The upcoming 1.2 patch will supposedly allow the user to toggle said auto-save feature, but I have found myself reloading auto-saves so frequently I can't imagine myself turning it off.

Unfortunately The Witcher is running on such a dated engine there is little that can be done to help it keep pace. Seems like the developers are really proud of their work, though. It seems like they are fully inclined to support the software whether Atari foots the bill or not. Still, they are listening to the community, and who knows. Maybe they had plans for making the engine more efficient AFTER the game was content complete. A few months from now and loading times might be inline with that of Oblivion.
 
the game could really benefit from some sort of caching, if it kept the large zone in memory while you enter little areas like single room houses etc it would cut the loading time by about 70%. And while the autosave feature is nice and handy it would be nice to be able to toggle it on/off or maybe reduce the frequency of autosaves.
My loading times are not too bad about 15-20 sec but it still gets annoying. Unfortunately by the time they fix it ill finish the game :(
 
Nenu said:
To sum up:
1) Defrag drive C: including free space for best effect or leave lots of free space.
2) Move the swapfile to your next fastest drive, defrag it before doing so.
Be sure that its not another partition on the same drive!
Click to expand...

Good advice but I taught every gamer knew that already ?

Defrag is running every night on every drive in my scheduler.
 
diskeeper has a background defragger that works great, it uses idles resources to defrag. Rarely do I have a problem w/ fragmentation :)
 
Denki said:
diskeeper has a background defragger that works great, it uses idles resources to defrag. Rarely do I have a problem w/ fragmentation :)
Click to expand...

O&O defrag has the same thing, works great
 
yeah - the load/save game times are long in this game.. I thought waiting 5 seconds for a save was a lot.. lol. I am used to quick save being immediate, or close to it.. I do defrag my raid0 set once every couple of weeks and run swap/page on my next fastest logical drive (WD 320 SATA2)... that seems to be a good good combo for max IO perf..

but holy crap.. waiting over a minute?? they should patch it to let you play the dice game while you wait. :eek:
 
dopefishzzz said:
Good advice but I taught every gamer knew that already ?

Defrag is running every night on every drive in my scheduler.
Click to expand...

Yeah I wondered whether to post it or not but then I saw so many people needing help on this, some of them must be in need of this info.

The reason I came across it is because I havent used a swapfile for about a year now.
I had no choice but to re-instate the swapfile to play Stalker as I have 2GB ram, with the intention of removing it again later.
As Stalker doesnt give me long load/save times, I wasnt bothered the swapfile was on drive C:.

Then this game came along and needed optimising :)
I realised the game saves were placed on the same drive as the default swapfile, moved the swapfile and saw the load/save times halve and realised that those getting really long load/save times might be in the same situation.
My swapfile was also quite fragmented before I moved it so theres quite a few elements which have been improved.
 
I think it's always good to post information like this... sometimes not for most, but not 100% of people do what they should to maintain an optimized PC all the time.. even if only a hand full of peeps benefit from it... I think that's part of the reason were here at [H].. other than to be smart asses to one another. ;)
 
Picked up another HD to try this out. It was pretty easy to move my Vista paging file to the new drive, but for one strange problem:

It won't let me set a maximum custom page file size greater than 4096MB.
I have 4GB of RAM installed (Vista 32 bit Home Premium).

When I check "System Managed" however, it picks an inital page file size of 7.5 GB. So why can't I make it go above 4 GB in custom? It's on a new drive, fresh NTFS format (done in Vista), nothing else on it.

I'm running Vista Ultimate at work (also 32 bit) dual boot with XP with only one HD, so I can't exactly duplicate my home setup. But I can easily set any size page file on my C: boot partition at work, so it can't be a 32bit limitation.

Searched online and in Vista tech help forums and came up empty. Apparently this is not an issue for anyone else?

Any info would be appreciated.
 
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