Not just you. Windows loads in 5-10s, and TS in 1-2 mins, it seems. I guess there’s a lot of scenery files to load!
A fast SSD helps, but TS takes a lot of loading. About 1 minute to load TS here... then 10 seconds to open the Drive menu... then anything from 30 seconds, to 3 minutes to run a scenario depending upon route and train chosen.
When I click any of the main buttons on the main menu TS pauses (or locks) and takes up to 30 secs to load the drive screen. Noticed this a lot more in recent months When loading scenarios things get a lot longer, especially when the routes are accessing assets from loads of other routes Glad my TSx is on an SSD and not a HDD!
Some quite intensive scenarios on certain routes can take 15 minutes to load, although I know my hard drive is getting on and I need to add more memory. I might try it offline and see if it makes a difference.
Holy shhhh... sugar! LOL. I thought 3 minutes was a pain! How do you stand that? Seriously... https://www.scan.co.uk/products/480gb-kioxia-exceria-25-ssd-sata-30-6gb-s-tlc-flash-555mb-s-read-540mb-s-write-retail You'll thank me later. It's not the best, or biggest SSD in the world, but it has DRAM cache, so will be OK.
I've got it running a an NVMe and it takes 2-3 minutes just to load to the main menu due to the massive about of mods and DLC.
Thank you I will take a look at that, it is good to have a recommendation. It won't be for a couple of months as I have a few household jobs to pay for but I am looking for a new hard drive. 15 minutes is the worse case scenario but it has happened, it was a scenario I made for Riviera in the 50's using a working timetable, it was intense. EDIT: That is quite cheap, I was expecting it to be over £100. I won't have to wait so long then!
You don't need to go to those lengths. There's little difference between loading times between a standard SATAIII SSD and a M.2 NVMe. This has been shown time and time again. Those on older systems that do not have PCIe 4.0 or even M.2, need not worry.
It's not specifically for TS. I have a gaming-centric PC that has 4 storage drives. 2 SSDs and 2 NVMes.
That's fair enough. It was really for the benefit of others who just look at the ridiculously high contiguous file transfer times of a NVMe drive, and assume their TS will load in one tenth of the time. That doesn't happen. In reality, when loading TS or a TS scenario, you are loading, and often decompressing lots of teeny tiny files... there will be no discernible difference between a bog standard SATA III SSD and a NVMe drive on PCIe 4.0. If you are reading and writing massive 8K video files from a Red camera or something, then sure... NVMe all the way... but loading games.. SATA is fine.. and cheaper. Save your M.2 slot for the boot drive... or if you have more than one... stripe them.. go mad... why not.. but don't put your games on it. Pointless.
Are the loading times dependent on whether the assets are in .ap format or not? Older routes like S&C open very quickly for me. Newer routes do not.
Anything that requires content to be decompressed will be slower, yes.. how slow dependent upon your CPU. Unpacking all .ap files makes your Railworks folder massive though, so it's not worth it.
PH Anything that requires content to be decompressed will be slower, yes That is true, but as .ap files are zero compressed files there is no decompression that takes place! It is as you say the sheer size of some the files in TS are massive and will always take time to load and run. Like the WCML South asset .ap file is around 2.8GB in size. If you extract that you add another 2.8GB to your file size and can double the workload of your system.
There is system overhead somewhere. I've tested this. Routes DO load faster when the .ap file is unpacked. Try it. Still pointless though unless you want to just have duplicates of files in each folder. There will be no extra workload as a result... it's not as if anything is being loaded twice just because you've unpacked it. It is just a waste of space. However, there are occasions where you need to unpack the .ap file. Certain batch files for third party reskins that copy geo files require the route to be unpacked in order to work... even if you do it manually you still need to unpack it first. There's no way around it sometimes, depending on what you need. There is no advantage to unpacking everything though as the loading time improvement is not really worth the lost disk space.
