> Most (many?) games take minutes to load.

What are you loading them off? HDD? The only time I experienced a load time longer than a minute for any game was on a PS2 game that was scratched to high hell. It's possible that I'm simply interested in games that don't have long load times but I've played enough of modern AAA on console and PC to never have experienced this first hand.

F1 2020 on Xbox is horrible, loading all the time. Loading once in the beginning would be ok, but it’s loading between every step. Sometimes it feels you spend more time waiting for the loading than actual racing.

That's bad design then. The Witcher 3 has no loads and rhe world is massive. As OP said, priorities.

A minute seems like a long wait for software that brags about its performance

It does depend on the game, but it's a good point. We do this 'cache everything at the start and avoid creation/destruction' during runtime thing that can lead to slower startup times.

After initial startup though, it depends a lot on the game itself how much loading you will wait for. I think SPAs are sort of the equivalent of zero-loading-screen games in some ways: both are trying to eliminate that loading pause.

Who is we? BR games have one map and reload it every time they start and even loading the menu takes extremely long. Then they go on top make the time between matches solid minutes to wait for people to be pointlessly loading the map. Fortnite for example (haven't played it in years but it was like that in the first 2-3 years). There's literally no excuse. Now that I got myself ranting on BR games I'll note that their quality is an order of magnitude worse (bugs, performance) than games with 5 minute rounds, while they have 30 minute rounds. Meh anyway I guess I'm attacking your random thought too hard.

That has never been different. Games push the envelope a lot. Especially if you don't have the best of everything.

Some awesome games were small. Other used a full 1.44" FDD. Some used 4 FDDs. Then the same happened with CDs. Finally only one CD needed. But there's space left over so later games made full use of it and soon there were games that needed 2 or more CDs. Lots of loading even going from one place to another. Decisions like "do I really want to go there now, I'll have to put in CD3 again". Or you bought the bigger HDD for much more $$$ and could install all 6 CDs onto that instead.

Can't run "Apache Longbow", need more RAM. But I can either buy the RAM or the game with the money I have. Damn!

What's been a blessing for me is not having the time to actually keep up with any of this time wise. Not enough time to really warrant spending money on new games and new hardware. Now I play games that are years and years old, I can get for cheap on GOG and that run fine on Intel Integrated graphics chips. Coincidentally those games usually load just fine in almost no time on modern SSDs as well and since I can't crank up the graphics full throttle, loading all that stuff into memory is relatively fast too etc.

Maybe on consoles. The only PC games I've played in the last decade that took minutes have been GTA5, Destiny 2, and heavily modded Minecraft. Most games load in under 15 seconds.

If anything, it's the other way around. PS5 games often don't even have loading bars, since they assume almost-instant streaming of assets from the SSD.

Subnautica takes ages to load.

Makes it scarier!

I like how 15 seconds is considered a decent bar.

15 seconds is my upper bar here, and it includes known, very poorly optimized, alpha games. Not once did anyone use the word decent here, you are imagining unsaid things.

Just check how much GPU memory games are using, it take a while to load a process the assets before they are ready to use, so the bottleneck is mostly IO I believe, AMD and Nvidia were working on improving that by loading assets directly into the GPU instead of first go to the CPU+RAM and then the GPU.

IO is also the bottleneck on the web, unsurprisingly.

I don’t know, is it? I get it, sure data has to be loaded, but the problematic part is the work being done on that data, this is what takes much more time than it should reasonably take.

Just take the example before, if twitter were server-side rendered, it would likely load in basically a blink of an eye.

The problem is code, which will later do more network calls which again have to be waited on, this is multiple round trips. Also, the fault lies probably a bit on web tech as well, html+css is just a terrible abstraction, layouting not being properly solved.

Maybe a partial solution will be to use qwick approach, load js on demand when needed, instead of all at once, while ideally will be use strictly the necessary js (that in some cases could be none).

Network calls are IO reducing them greatly speeds up websites.

A network call waiting on the result of another call is still two times as long as it should/could be, no matter how efficient you make it.

Optimizing your IO is indeed a good idea. Back in the day we used to order game data on CD/DVD for efficient streaming.

I don't think so.

My Internet connection saturates my PLC at 10MiB/s, my ping is under the 15ms, and Twitter still takes ~2.4s to load and render a random tweet.

Twitter is a terrible piece of garbage website, isn't that why everyone uses it as the ultimate example of the web sucking?

Twitter wants you to download their app and sign up so they intentionally neutered their web experience. It would probably require 0.1% of their 7500 employees to spend 3 months to fix it entirely, but it's business that drives the bad tech, not the developers

I build internal apps that load collaborative an entire app with MBSE capabilities that have a time to interactivity of < 10s. Google docs takes like 7s to spin up a new doc and interact with it. I can promise you Twitter could reduce rendering some stylish HTML/CSS and a 280 character tweet to a single round trip and see maximum 0.5s browser parse & paint if they wanted to

Taking a quick look at a random tweet through the network tab, about 2/3rds of the time spent is on downloading files. Now should Twitter preload a bunch of videos from recommended tweets it shows below the tweet? Probably not. Does Twitter need megabytes of JavaScript just to show a tweet? I'd hope not. Those things do appear to be the main bottleneck however.

That's not true.

I dunno it definitely seems that way. In our own product reducing IO significantly sped up time to live.

And for the love of God, if it's a single player game let me pause while it's loading (which shouldn't interrupt the loading, but should make it start in a paused state).

Definitely correct me if I’m wrong, but games have thousands of little cores generating those frames every 17ms, but websites usually rely on a big slow cpu to direct the workflow of tiny packets from some far off network, no?

Yeah, but the list of things to render still has to be presented to the GPU in less than that time, from the CPU (draw call).

Games also rely on the CPU to do simulation and feed the GPU. And Browsers also use the GPU for the actual rendering where possible.

I haven't noticed loading times in many years, basically since SSD replaced HDD.