Left 4 Dead - tweaks & loading times Created 15 years ago2008-12-20 19:25:07 UTC by Jinx

First of all, buy this game. It's just so damn fun.

My system is loading levels way too slowly. This results in people being able to join the next map before me, then switch to my team, 'bumping' me in effect. Also, I think it is making the game think I am a 'new' player each map, as I have not gotten some achievements that involve completing a campaign.

I just upgraded my video card from a 6800GT 256mb to an HD3850 512mb, and it's slower now to load up! It's AGP, so maybe loading textures etc. onto the card takes longer? Otherwise, I have 3GB of ram, and the swap file is on a drive separate from Steam & Windows. So it seems like it should load fast as hell. And once it does load, the game runs well. I just don't get it.

Also, what are people finding to be the best settings for performance? I have a 3.47ghz P4, and I'm not sure what the best settings are for me:

Multicore Rendering
Paged Pool Memory

The P4 isn't multi-core, but it has Hyperthreading, so I'm not sure which way to go on the multicore setting. And I have plenty of memory to spare, but is it pagefile space it is talking about? I'd rather set that lower and have it use my RAM. Again, not sure what is optimal :/

Thanks in advance for any ideas...

Loading times are mostly based on RAM (and possibly CPU), but not really on your video card. Since you have a P4, it's likely that you have DDR-400 RAM, which is twice as slow as most modern machines (DDR2-800). And it goes without saying that a P4 is not the best CPU to run L4D on, so loading times will always be fairly long. As for why it's longer, I couldn't say.

Hyperthreading is not multicore, and for all source games you should bump the Paged Pool memory up to 400 or so (last I saw there was a tutorial thread in the Steam forums with 3 options: ~200mb, ~300mb, and ~400mb. I'd take the third option.)

Paged Pool Memory = how much of the page/swap file it will use at max?

Hyperthreading is not multicore, but it shows as two virtual processors- so multi-threaded applications can run better with it. If the option is setting whether the game runs multithreaded, having it on should be better for HT P4's. Though tbh I can't tell a difference with it on or off so it may not matter for me. (In fact, I think it might be there as a debugging tool for certain multicore processors.)

I really wish the TweakGuides guy would do a L4D guide, or at least update the Source one with a section on it. A lot of 'source tweaks' are locked out in l4d, so it's harder to optimize it. I can't believe HDR is locked on- it's a huge performance killer, and the effect is rarely noticeable other than when it is an annoyance.

I moved my swap to a faster SATA drive (different drive from windows & steam), and the load times are a bit better now. Hopefully it's enough to avoid problems online.

I have no idea what paged pool memory is apart from the fact that Source likes to have lots of it.