First, my computer has no SSD so any comparison I make here all assume both the Xbox and my PC are running on regular hard disks.
After using the PC version of Killer Instinct I’m really confused on why this game has such bad loading times on the console version. I tried both installing the game on the internal and external hard drive but the difference is so great that I can only assume something else than just seek times and hard drive RPM is at play here.
It’s not just the stage loading. Everything from navigating through menus to selecting characters is sluggish on console, like the game is constantly streaming and never caches anything. I know the GPU on the console is not the most powerful but the hard drive and memory modules are very similar to a modern laptop, then why such laptop can also load the game faster? Are the IO drivers on Xbox One that bad? (That would actually explain such long install times).
I was wondering this same exact thing. I noticed the game runs super smooth on my laptop gaming rig, but on the xbox one, it seems like everything takes just a few more seconds for anything to load.
I think it has to do with the Xbox Live service itself - the console, unlike your PC, is in constant communication with the service all of the time. Simply do a speedtest on your PC, and then do a detailed network statistics test on your console to see the differences in download speed, upload speed, and ping - the PC will always come out on top.
Yeah the sluggishness of the menus is annoying. Not sure why it’s a KI problem. Every other game on the Xbox has menus that are flawless. Look at MKX, Quantum Break… KI is the only game where the menu is messy like this. Bad programming?
Personally, with the exception of the “checking for downloaded content” loading screen and the occasional matchmaking hang-up where it seems to search for an opponent forever, I don’t really see anything else on the console version that’s abnormally slow (and my network connection is admittedly pretty slow).
I think I said it wrong. It’s fine, just loading each screen stutters. Once the screen is loaded it’s great. I don’t think the load times are bad at all personally, just the between menu stuttering… And yeah that Check Download screen has gotten crazy long. it used to be really fast.
Did you have the opportunity to compare to a PC? It’s night and day.
Each character you select gives you time to choose between normal or retro model, outfit and color before the character loads. On PC you barely has time to choose outfit, simply choosing between normal and retro loads the character almost instantly.
Not all of those things contact Live servers. Also as others pointed out, other games don’t have the same problem.
I’m under the impression that the loading of assets is probably on the same thread as the main loop of the game, hence the sluggishness.
I just find it odd KI is the one game with a sluggish menu. When you jump between screens it stutters and freezes for a moment. Other games are flawless there.
the only thing I can think with the “check download” screen is that it is running down the list of DLC and doing a validation to confirm whether or not the user has it installed. I wish they could set that up to run silently in the background it is 2016, please IG, get rid of that nonsense. thank you
Xbox was running on Mid tier PC hardware 3 years ago when it was released. At this point it’s not even close. This is why some console makers are grasping at straws to compete hence we have playstations 4.5 coming out this winter with better hardware specs.
I know this sounds like blah blah pc master race. It’s really not objectively speaking Xbox Hardware is old and slow.
Xbox (and PS4) may have become “old” hardware by now, but that has absolutely nothing to do with game load times.
Hard drives didn’t get better, the 5400 RPM hard drive you buy now has the same speed it had 3 years ago. Also DDR3 memory is still around and didn’t improve from 3 years ago until now. The only major thing that improved considerably from 3 years to now was GPU technology.
My current PC was built before I bought my Xbox One at release, has no SSD and can load KI much faster than the Xbox can.
You seem to believe Hardrive mechanical speed is the only variable for loading time. Just so you know your xbox is not running in some sort of vaccum where it’s only executing one process. But even if I wanted to nitpick and just consider that variable alone you do realize that read and write times can differ on Hard Drives that run at the same RPM. Sorry I’m not wasting anymore of my time with this one.
No, I don’t believe it is the case and never said I did. I’m asking what is the problem and presenting data about how the hardware on the console should perform, giving the fact it uses the same kind of hardware for storage and memory found on most laptops.
We don’t know the details of how the operating system on the Xbox runs and yes, it sure is running a lot of other processes besides the game I’m currently running, but some facts you’re ignoring are: a) Windows ALSO runs a lot of other processes on the background - a lot more than the Xbox for a bunch of other things the Xbox doesn’t need to do - and yet it doesn’t affect load times the way it affects the Xbox One version. b) Xbox, being a game console, probably has an entire different priority system for processes that give games a higher priority when running (which can be seen when you snap an app like Youtube and see the video stutter but the game never loses performance). Windows doesn’t do that unless specifically asked to, yet it still loads faster than the Xbox version. c) Other multiplat games actually load faster on the Xbox than on a PC.
Yes, I realize that, the same way I realize that doesn’t mean the Xbox has the slowest hard drive on the market and it doesn’t even utilize the exact same brand and model on all units but KI consistently loads slower on Xbox despite the hard drive inside that actual unit. I also realize the Xbox supports external hard drives through USB3, making very easy to just use a different, faster hard drive and see how much faster the game loads.
I realize that so much that I did the test, since I do have a USB3 Western Digital external hard drive. I switched KI between the internal and this external hard drive. On other games where I did this test (specifically Battlefield 4) I did get slightly faster load times, but with KI the menus where still sluggish and loading characters on the select screen still took more time than it took for me to select the character, the outfit and the color, triggering bugs where the character silhouette doesn’t unload and stays there while the game is loading the stage. My PC has none of these problems, menu navigation is perfectly fluid and characters load instantaneously after I first select them, giving me a perfect preview of the outfit I want to use, something that on Xbox requires me to wait a few seconds for the game to load the character model.
Well, you came up with the argument in the first place. Rest assured you won’t be missed.
