What's the best way to reduce game loading times?

Question

I have an SSD, and I was wondering what's the best way to remove game loading times (the bits in-between areas in Half Life 2 for example).

It's already significantly faster than my other, mechanical drive, but I was thinking of ways it could be improved:

Enabling compression on the filesystem on the SSD - with a fast CPU on an IO-bound system, shouldn't this speed up read times as less data needs to be accessed?
Other software tweaks in Windows
Hardware settings in BIOS / firmware upgrade

while i cant comment on other things ill jsut say that id avoid the data compression. while you will save on initial file I/O as you will need you read less, you will then have to decompress the data and write that to memory and then clear compressed stuff. almost certainly taking longer.
Make sure all your drivers are up to date and you're on Windows 7 (great SSD support with TRIM baked in). Don't compress.

Nam Phung · Answer 1 · 2012-06-27 13:07:33Z

up vote 2 down vote

Compressing file on SSD will make the performance worse. The possible way to improve the performance are:

Exit anti-virus software, close as much as possible running programs/service/task.
Upgrading the hardware.

answered Jun 27 '12 at 13:07

Nam Phung
1211

Rodolfo · Answer 2 · 2012-06-27 21:27:25Z

SSD alone is the biggest 'one-shot' improvement you'll get. Other than that you can try:

Add another SSD and set them in a RAID
Check the game in question is not writing files in your HDD (if your C: drive is HDD, it's possible that some temporary files and other game-related cached files are being written there)
More RAM. If you have less than 4GB this is a must, if you have 4GB it's still recommended. 8GB is a sweet number.
Check running processes (antivirus, antispyware, firewall, etc). Some security programs can make things very slow, and only have one of each (if that) running at the same time, i.e., don't have 2 antivirus running at the same time.

RAM amounts divisible by 2? Triple-channel for the win (unless we're talking quad-channel).
SSD is a big one-shot improvement, but I believe that having the game installed on a RAMdrive would be an even bigger one. Of course this is a pain to set up, and eats up a huge chunk of RAM that might be better spent on other things.
@Fambida yes I was going to mention RAM drive but only as a curiosity thing, just to see how fast it gets, but not as a practical solution.

2 Answers