Long loading times in Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age?

This week Mass Effect 2 launched worldwide, and I've had to leave on hold my Dragon Age gaming until I finish it (I'm around 16 hours of ME2 playtime).

While I will leave my judgement of the game, it's RPG softening for the masses, it's incredible narrative (being simple doesn't means it can't have deep transcripts) and a small screenshots gallery I'm taking as I play for a later post, today I wanted to comment something that happened to me and I've finally fixed (thanks to the ME2 community, but I can't find the exact post).

If you have a Dual-Core or Quad-Core CPU, there seems to be an Unreal Engine 3 bug that causes some incredibly long loading times in Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age (I suffered it only on ME2, but I will try in Dragon Age to see if speed improves too). A 5 seconds loading screen in an affected computer takes easily 20 to 30 seconds!

The solution is easy but a bit boring because each time you launch the game you have to repeat it:

  1. When the game is running, ALT+TAB from it or minimize and open the Windows Task Manager
  2. Go to the Processes tab, right click on masseffect2.exe and select Set Affinity.
  3. Uncheck all CPUs and check only the first one (CPU 0).
  4. Close Task Manager and get back to the game again.

Loading times should be much much faster!


Long loading times in Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age? published @ by

Categories: Videogames

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