The game world continues to evolve and develop every year with new technologies and techniques. But one thing hasn’t changed since the beginning of the games: the loading screen.
When we start the games, when we want to continue from where we left off, or when switching between chapters, we encounter loading screens in every game. So why these loading screens?
Why is there a “Loading” screen?
There is only one main reason for the loading screens we see in every video game: Everything from the text we see in the game to a piece of grass, from a single pixel of color on our character to huge buildings is ‘transferred’ by the computer in this process.
At this point, “Well, haven’t we already downloaded the game, where else are we transferring it?” you may ask. The answer to this question lies in the working logic of a computer.
What happens on the loading screen?
Everything we download to our computer is permanently stored on storage media in the form of a hard disk or SSD. But these files are not processed by the computer unless we open them or send a request for them, they just exist.
For this, let’s briefly explain what happens when you open these files when you download a music or picture: The data of the files in the storage unit are transferred to the DRAMs, which act as ‘temporary data storage’. You know, those thin rectangular pieces that are written as 8 or 16 GB in our computer specifications.
The same process works in games and in every conceivable process. All data found in a game, such as ‘assets’, codes that run the game, and save files are transferred from permanent storage to temporary storage when we launch the game or skip a chapter.
This is where the difference between HDD and SSD comes in: the higher the write speed of your storage, the faster the data is transferred to RAM.
So why aren’t the files being read directly from the SSD, what’s the need for DRAM?
These units, defined as DRAM, have data read and write speeds thousands of times faster than even an SSD. If you tried to run any program without DRAM, you would have to wait unimaginable times.
This speed is so high that each data stored in DRAM can be processed through RAM in just nanoseconds.
That’s why the amount of RAM in the system requirements of games is critical:
When you look at the system requirements of the games, you may encounter very different levels of RAM requirements. This requirement actually says the total size of all critical files that must be read for a game to run. The higher the RAM capacity, the more game files the system can store in temporary memory, the game runs much more fluently.
When your RAM capacity is insufficient, the game will hang much more. This is because your RAM first deletes the ‘old’ data during this time and replaces it with new data that will appear on the screen. Of course, the processor and graphics card also calculate the new data coming to the RAM from the beginning.
The role and importance of the processor and graphics card also comes into play at this point:
This is where the power of your processor comes into play. All data transferred to DRAM is managed by your processor. What you see when you look at the screen in the game is determined by the calculations made by your processor and video card. The higher the computing power, the better the gaming performance.
What can you do to speed up the loading screen?
If you want to spend less time on loading screens, the first thing you should do is to optimize your storage first. If you are a HDD user, you will take the first step by upgrading to SSD.
While we’re on the topic of acceleration, let’s give some advice to those who have problems such as stuttering. If you are experiencing this problem, it may be due to two reasons: Your processor/video card or RAM is insufficient. If you meet the amount of RAM in the game’s system requirements, the problem will depend on the first cause.
At this stage, you can choose the most suitable parts for you by looking at the system requirements of the games and upgrade your computer.
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