Gaming Load times: Can one make of video card load games faster?

[ECH]

Yep. Shader loading on ATI cards take a lot longer than on Nvidia cards. This is a very real problem which I think ATI needs to address. In Just Cause 2 you'll probably see maybe 2 seconds load time from startup screen to frontend menu if you're using an Nvidia card, whereas the same takes maybe 10 seconds if you're on an ATI card. The difference is all about shader loading time.



HLSL to D3D asm can be precompiled, but the optimization step is done by the driver at runtime. A driver could opt to cache already optimized shaders though, but I don't think anyone does.

Can ATI actually fix this problem via drivers? This is something I've seen mentioned for few generations now.

 

[Humus]

I would think so. I don't think they necessarily want to spend less CPU time to optimize shaders. They do have a more complex architecture that needs more optimizer work to take full advantage of. However, AFAIK Nvidia drivers have threaded shader optimizations, i.e. they simply add each new shader to a work thread on shader creation and return, and then do the optimization work on another thread. I think the ATI drivers still do all work before returning from CreatePixelShader().

 

[ECH]

I would think so. I don't think they necessarily want to spend less CPU time to optimize shaders. They do have a more complex architecture that needs more optimizer work to take full advantage of. However, AFAIK Nvidia drivers have threaded shader optimizations, i.e. they simply add each new shader to a work thread on shader creation and return, and then do the optimization work on another thread. I think the ATI drivers still do all work before returning from CreatePixelShader().

Well thanks for your insight on the subject. I do hope that the ATI driver team can finally correct and improve this problem.

Edit:
I wonder if this is were ATI Stream SDK 2.01 can come into play and help improve load times?

 

[ECH]

Anyone notice that when you join a new round most others are already engaged in combat or no where near the original spawn point in BF:BC2?

link

-Users with ATI cards are experiencing longer-than-normal load times between rounds [especially on DX10] (unknown whether this is catalyst/video card specific or not)