I've been playing NMS for a couple months now, and recently the load times have gotten out of hand.

I play on my laptop, so I'm stuck with integrated graphics (and I can live with not pretty for the portability) = Intel UHD, but the rest of the hardware is good (it's my work laptop :) Dell7750, i9-10885 @2.4 w/32GB installed and a 1TBSSD.

How long have the load times become? 6 minutes from save select to 'boots on the ground'.

Is it me, my laptop or the game? I play offline, because, you know....If I wanted human interactions, I'd go outside. I also have been running the game from the downloaded, offline version (straight from NMS.exe) not through gog...

What have I done to troubleshoot? Ensured nothing else was running in the background, fresh install on my other drive (another 1TB SSD), dialed the graphics settings way down and otherwise poked around the internet trying to find a clue.

Any clues? High graphic demands shouldn't affect load times that much, should they?

Guessing it's the graphics engine. I'm running a rather dated home-built ASRock desktop system: i7-3770 @3.5 GHz, 16 GB main memory, a 1 TB SSD, and a GTX 1660 Ti w/ 6GB GDDR6 on board. Takes around two minutes from selecting the saved game until it's "live."

AIUI, when HG shifted to Vulcan drivers the game no longer uses a shader cache that's saved in the game folder but rather builds a new one on the fly. That may be what's taking so long.

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FWIW, I re-installed the Dell drivers. No go. So (in spite of all the cautions to use Dell's drivers), I installed the drivers directly from Intel.

Load time, from save select to on the ground, went down to 43 seconds (from 6 minutes!), and I could dial some of the graphics settings back up.

So, yeah. Graphics seems to impact load times.

Interesting! And a good data point for anyone else who may be experiencing long load times.

Surprising that there's so much of a differnce between the native Intel drivers and Dell's. I wonder if Dell is writing their own, and why. To avoid a per-unit software license fee to Intel, maybe?

Ah well, good news though. See ya 'round the universe!