Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Actually, since most of the time seems to be spent pulling the level off the 
> HD or DVD, I would think you could pre-buffer the files at least. *That* 
> should be pretty trivial to implement, even if unpacking the levels into 
> individual objects and such can't be done easily. I'd imagine that would 
> reduce loading times a bunch.

  I'm not so intimately acquainted with the PC architecture to know for
sure, but how much can disk-to-RAM data transfer be made in parallel
with everything else a game can do, in terms of memory bus usage (iow.
does disk I/O have to share, and hence compete for, the same memory
bus as the CPU and, more significantly, the GPU, when transferring data
from the main RAM to it)?

  I know that the DMA chip allows transferring data between RAM and the
different devices without the need for the CPU to do anything (other
than launching the transfer), so things like pre-loading data from disk
to memory takes zero CPU time. However, I'm thinking how much congestion
it causes on the memory bus, and if it could have a negative impact on
data transfer performance in other critical areas (such as transferring
data from the main RAM to the GPU, which happens all the time).

  Of course there are many games, especially the open sandbox type ones,
which are specifically *designed* to load data on the fly, avoiding any
loading pauses completely. However, can speeding up level data loading by
pre-loading data on the background using available free memory be done
without the game engine having been specifically designed to do so?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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