07/07/2017

Loading In, Part 2

I've previously mocked the strange way in which Neverwinter loads its graphics assets on the character selection screen, but lately it's started to affect my in-game experience as well. I'm wondering if I cranked up the graphics settings a bit too high when I got my new PC?

It's at its most annoying when it comes to the user interface, as certain windows will load as transparent initially, making it really hard to find the right icons and buttons until the background loads about a minute later. But it's even more noticeable in my surroundings with things like trees, which will initially appear as bizarre polygonal crystal formations until their actual "tree skin" appears.


If anyone's got any suggestions as for what causes this, I'd be happy to hear them. It's actually gotten a lot better again as of late, so maybe it was a temporary server-side issue more than anything related to my PC or game settings, but I still wanted to get this out there anyway.

4 comments:

  1. I can honestly say that once I replaced the (now dead) graphics card in the desktop with a Radeon RX470, a lot of those sort of issues went away. Actually, the only issues I ended up having were due to Perfect World complaining that my graphics drivers were old when in fact they were "too new" to be in the driver lists for the Perfect World loading screens. (That's now been fixed too.)

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    1. Hm, it shouldn't be an "old graphics card" issue as I only bought this PC in autumn of last year, but maybe it was the drivers, as those have certainly been updated in the meantime.

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  2. Well, in my case it kept telling me my graphics card was out of date and I should updated to driver XXX or newer. The thing was, mine was newer, so new that it was getting tweaks every week or so. Once the new drivers had a chance to stabilize, however, the problem went away.

    I went on the STO forums about the issue and discovered that it had to do with what was generally thought of as a "stable" release, not just a "production" release. Apparently having a stable release is more intrusive than having a typical production level driver release.

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    1. Er, not "intrusive", but "conservative". As in, STO might believe that the most recent stable driver release is 15.50, while the most recent production release is 15.85. So, it would be configured to accept up to driver version 15.50 and think that anything higher than that is simply not a recommended release.

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