How do loading screens work

As in RAM. Random Access Memory loads hundreds of times faster then most hard-drives. So when a games is loading, it is puling all the information it'll need off of the hard-drive, formatting it to make it useful for the software to use and storing it in ram. Unfortunately, most people's RAM is still limited. Only 8gb to maybe 32gb. For some games, that isn't enough to load everything into especially since your operating system and other programs are using some.

The end result: the game only loads some of the information into RAM. When you need more, you get a loading screen. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What happens during "loading" screens? Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 9 months ago. Active 4 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 9k times. Improve this question. And if someone could recommend any good tags, I was struggling with how to categorize this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Here's a small list of what a typical app does during the Loading stage: Pre-calculation. A very broad explanation, but usually it's calculating paths for pathfinding, rendering vector graphics into the raster, saving pre-calculated baked byte data to a local storage path, loading data from local storage into memory RAM.

Larger apps need to create more objects than smaller apps before they can start. It's even slower when some frameworks with large footprint are being used. The application is heavily loaded at that time and isn't responsive. For further information, including information on how to prevent or manage the use of cookies on this Platform, please refer to our Privacy and Cookie Policy.

Coding and Scripts. Studio Basics. User Interface. Collapse Sidebar Tutorials All Content. Hide content Show content. This article covers loading screens which appear when players initially join the game. Taking these two devices:. For games, developers like to clump assets into large files.

This allows the game to do only one file request for multiple assets. Other applications may be highly modular and contain a lot of separate plugins. This results in a lot more file transfer requests and will add to the loading time. Once an application is in RAM, technically, it starts running.

For example, Linux goes through the following steps to start up summary from IBM :. A lot of these steps are processing and have little to do with actually transferring data from storage to RAM.

GTA V has two spikes of loading data with moderate processing until the end, where it appears to finalize a lot of things at once before dropping off once the game is ready. Portal 2 loads lots of data at the beginning and a lot of smaller files toward the end, as indicated by the spike of read ops and low bandwidth.