CoD5 W@W Very Slow Start times !!SOLUTION!!

** Edit: SOLUTION FOUND. 24 March 2010, scroll down to post on that date **

Lo people.

I'm not new to CoD5. I've played it hard for 13 months now.. but I have installed it on Sair's PC now and it is taking an ETERNITY to load.. an eternity.

I have a quad core 2.67 with 4 gig and have run both XP and Vista 64 on it. Intel mobo (old 965 chipset) with an X1900 XT, and then a 4870 Toxic. Hard drives varied from WD AAKS 400gig to Samsung F1 750 gig to Hitachi 1tb

But Sair's rig is

XP Pro, ATI motherboard, AMD X64 3700, 2 gig ram, and an X1600 XT, with a Barracuda 160 HD and a WD 320


I have installed the game on both drives and it's fully patched. I have tried installing the very latest DX from MS website and it made a good difference to game performance but not to boot time.

Lets put it this way... from clicking the Icon to being in game menu is 45 seconds...not great but do-able.. but to choose a game (previous save or new game) to playing... is 3 minutes!!!

I spent sme time in Google and it's quite common... mainly with ATI cards.

The thing is, the game ITSELF plays ok... quite acceptable at 1024 x768 on this card, with medium eye candy.....

(she's killing stuff right now to my side.....)

but the game LOAD times are crazy.

So... anyone know the solution.

It's NOT a quick PC, BUT my mate saofg here on HEXUS had an X4200 twin core, same clock speed as this X64 3700 and it's fine....

so... why so slooooooow to boot?

Antivirus running at all?

Tried a defrag? Just taking a stab in the dark there though if I'm honest.

No AV running.

Defragged to death

Try googling it... if you find some of the more sensible posta on the subject it's a fairly wide spread issue.

I thought I had is sussed by using the latest DX download, but after a PC reboot it's just as bad.

It seems to be the sheer size and scale of the textures going to a 256mb card, but once it's loaded it's quite playable, if a tad jerky at times.

But the LOAD times are... remarkable. Between levels, she had to wait for 4 minutes and 20 seconds from lvl 1 to lvl2

Which version of windows does she have running?

I might be being completely blind but i think you only stated your verison

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Biscuit

Which version of windows does she have running?

I might be being completely blind but i think you only stated your verison

---

Biscuit.... member of win

XP Pro my man..sorry.

Argh if it wa Vista or 7 i was going to suggest it being something to do with aero/basic switch as that sometimes slows my loading times down quite a bit, but on XP that does seem quite puzzling.

Are the catalyst settings all set to 'choose by software' ?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Biscuit

Argh if it wa Vista or 7 i was going to suggest it being something to do with aero/basic switch as that sometimes slows my loading times down quite a bit, but on XP that does seem quite puzzling.

Are the catalyst settings all set to 'choose by software' ?

---

yes... Application Preference.. but I'v etried those all too manually...

the game's fine.. te load screens are still mad wrong

Bit of a longshot but you could try some kind of 'No-CD' patch. Not sure how valid i am to tell you where to get them or which ones to try but maybe its trying to read from the CD while your loading a game and the drive is a bit dodgy?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Biscuit

Bit of a longshot but you could try some kind of 'No-CD' patch. Not sure how valid i am to tell you where to get them or which ones to try but maybe its trying to read from the CD while your loading a game and the drive is a bit dodgy?

---

IIRC multiplayer CoD doesn't require the disk, so running multiplayer would rule that out.

I have this same problem with WaW on the steam version. I get bad slow down whilst gaming and also the load times take a while to get into the levels. My machine isn't a bad spec either. Dropping the details down doesn't seem to help matters either. It's been like this since I got it, so much so that when I saw it for the 360 for £5 in a PC World sale bin I grabbed it.

Might try to download and install it again through steam. Never really got into the MP side of it as I was on CoD4 and now MW2 but tempted to go back and start playing the MP for WaW.

I have a No DVD for it anyway.. I use it for the Single Player game and see no issue with explaining that because this game goes online before it boots so you cant have two people with one game serial anyway (i got Sair a second hand copy so we can play Co Op soon)

But it's slow on SINGLE PLAYER loads AND MP loads. It's slow on everything in the build up to playing and then it's acceptable. But complete a level and heaven forfend if you want to play the next level this side of Easter!

FIXED :)

I have just installed a Dual Core CPU (Opteron 180... Cheers Stoo :)) and it loads the game in 15 seconds now.

Single Core CPU causes the issue.

I put a single back in... back to same problem... back to Dual Core.. sorted.

Level boot times are now visible on the load bar as the HDD is the only thing I wait for. No blank screens before that.

Proper Pleased :)

It does say on the back of the box that it's "optimised for multi-cores" or something along those lines, in micro-print...

Seriously though, optimised is one thing - completely screwing up single-core performance is another.

I'm surprised it's that bad, almost sounds as if they never bothered to test it on a single-core.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by snootyjim

Seriously though, optimised is one thing - completely screwing up single-core performance is another.

I'm surprised it's that bad, almost sounds as if they never bothered to test it on a single-core.

---

the GAME plays fine on Singlecore...

it's the BOOTING UP of the game and the LOADING of the levels... over 4 minutes on this rig with a single core.

Single and sual core both run at 2.4 gig by the way.. so it's not clock speed that's the issue!