PCA Forums

I've been playing CounterStrike: Source for a while and I've always had to experience very long loading times to get into a server, longer than most people I know. Is there anything I can do to make it more smooth and faster?

Since we know nothing about your system's specifications, it is pretty hard to give you truly accurate suggestions.

Long load times can be a symptom of not enough RAM. I noticed an improvement going from 512MB to 1 Gig in UT2004 and going from 1 Gig to 2 Gigs in FEAR.

You definately need at least 1Gb nowadays (in XP - 2Gb for Vista) to do serious gaming.

In my experience the biggest cause for long load times in CS:S is your hard drive. I used to have two computers here, one that a friend would use for gaming. Both PCs had the same processor & RAM and both had IDE drives. When I upgraded one system to a SATA drive it would consistently beat the other PC loading a CS:S map by a good margin. The server map would change and I'd be playing for a whole minute before he finished loading his map.

When was the last time you defragged the drive partition with your games on it? Couldn't hurt to defrag it.

CS:S (and Dod:S for that matter) take a really long time to load the map if you have HDR (High Dynamic Range) enabled in the game's video settings. Having HDR enabled requires that the game load 4 times as much map data.

As an experiment try disabling HDR and see how much faster your map loads. I have found HDR to be of limited value in either game. Yeah it looks slightly prettier but in CS:S or Dod:S it's not significant. Only game I leave HDR enabled in is HL2 EP2 - in that game at least you can stop and appreciate the scenery.

Disabling HDR will also dramatically improve performance if you don't have a high end gaming system.

I'll try disabling HDR. By the way, how do you defrag a drive partition? I'm a major n00b when it comes to certain PC topics.

Go to Start - All Programs - Accessories - System Tools
Run Disk Defragmenter. It is easy from there.

That is not the only way to get to it ofcourse.

Is defragging safe or will it delete some of my files?

CrazyBones wrote:Is defragging safe or will it delete some of my files?

No, it won't hurt your puter or files. May take awhile to run it though, depending on the size of your hardrive. It will speed you up some, but like FP and the others said, Ram is what you need for gaming.

Defragging doesnt delete anything. To my knowledge it just groups like files on your hdd or filles that need to be close together on your hdd to increase performance. Basically when a program needs multiple files off you hdd it doenst have to search all over the platters to get it. I may be a bit off on this though.