Bad Company 2 Slow PC Load Times Fixed by ATI Beta Drivers

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ATI has released a new driver set, the Catalyst 10.4 Preview, aimed at fixing long level load times in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for players with Radeon series 5 video cards, available in Windows 7 and Vista and Windows XP flavours from FileShack.

ATI warns that these drivers won't work on HD5800 Eyefinity 6 products, while ATI's Terry Makedon says on Twitter that a fix for series 4800 cards is planned for next week.

Bad Company 2 recently received a second map pack and PC gamers apparently do still have Battlefield 1943 to look forward to, which EA says is due "soon."

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    April 15, 2010 7:11 AM

    Was this issue intermittent? I perceive no slow down in loading levels when playing this game. I'm using 2x 5870's.

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      April 15, 2010 7:19 AM

      You don't really notice it until you see how quickly things load with an NVIDIA card.

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        April 15, 2010 7:21 AM

        Yeah, this is probably it. It was completely painful going from an 8800 to a 5800. The hotfix works great though!

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      April 15, 2010 7:23 AM

      No intermitency. The graphic driver was always compiling the shaders as a part of loading the level, instead of using precompiled ones (or something like that). Let's say perhaps the game needs 21 seconds to load a level in your pc.

      Well, it truly should need only 9 seconds, the other 11 were doing the shader part.

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        April 15, 2010 7:25 AM

        With that explanation, with the fact that it is fixed with video drivers he might not notice it as much if its compiling it with some GPGPU DirectCompute stuff on his Crossfire'd cards.

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        April 15, 2010 7:25 AM

        Got it. Thanks guys. It really didn't feel that slow though. It will be interesting to see if I can immediately notice the difference when I get home and load it tonight.

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          April 15, 2010 7:35 AM

          Its noticable on my friends ATI card compared to my GTX260. My game loads in about 6-7 seconds, where his takes about 35-40 seconds.

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