Why does eve take so long to do things
when i start the game from clicking a character portrait to being in game i have a black window for between 45 to 60s long (and even then the game is jerky and laggy for a minute or two afterwards)
When I dock i get a black screen and flashing docking logo for 10 to 20s long
Surely it shouldn’t take this long? I have the entire client installed
Move your eve client to an M.2 SSD. There is no other way to compensate for CCP’s bad coding quality and incredibly unoptimized assets.
would that reduce the black loading screen though? I understand that would help with the lag/jerky situation though
No such thing here, at all. Not with my old PC and not with the one that replaced it a few months ago. If you are having issues you’re going to have to be more specific about what PC you have and how well it’s running, otherwise you’re not going to get any useful answers.
I have PC running Windows 11, the game is installed on a 7300rpm HDD (not an SSD). I have 32gb RAM and it is an i7-8700 @ 3.2o GHz 6 core
it has an RX 6600 GFX Card running 2 monitors at 1920x1080
Unless your windows/PC is a mess, so it’s slow for pretty much everything, that should be sufficient. Get yourself a cheap Sata SSD: a basic 1TB is around $50-60, a 512 GB probably 30-50. That’ll help tremendously.
From other reports of the situation, it appears that EVE just leaves you at a black/frozen screen while it loads various assets (mostly graphics models). Other games at least give you some indicator to show your game hasn’t simply frozen, but CCP doesn’t really believe in such conveniences.
Long pauses where the game isn’t crashed but leaves you hanging on a black or frozen screen can typically be traced to one of three issues:
In your case I’d agree with Aisha and Dyver, it’s probably EVE loading large chunks of data from your HD. Get a decent SSD - do a little research first, lowest price can also mean lowest quality or throughput.
It reduced my lag and black screens considerably. I used to have EVE on an HDD. the first undock from a station had anywhere from 20-30 seconds of black screen, followed by lots of grid loading lag. When I moved to an M.2 SSD, the black screen disappeared almost entirely (maybe 1-2 seconds ) and the grid loading lag is gone
I still had lag at Jita undock, with a SSD, until CCP removed the depots.
My current gaming PC, which has a M.2 SSD and RTX 3060 graphics takes 4 seconds to go from character selection to the display of being in dock.
However I never had a ‘45 to 60s long’ delay even with my old computer that had a 5000 rpm hard drive and quite basic Nvidia R7 graphics. So I really very much doubt that its just the specs alone causing the problem.
As others have pointed out, an SSD is the way to go. I consider EVE Online almost unplayable from HDD these days.
There’s a very high chance his mainboard doesn’t support M.2, it’s probably easiest/safest to go for a SATA one.
Or any modern games for that matter, or in fact anything at all.
I think SSD is the way to go 1st, ill look into that
Check your MB docs and see if it supports SATA or nVME M2 (noticeably faster in some tasks). And maybe pop back in and update if it resolved the issue for you, because this comes up every so often and it will help others with it.
I had the same issues.
Worst was undocking from Jita. My system should NOT have any issues, but alas, this is CCP… cutting edge in breaking things that worked just fine previously.
My issues were fixed when I went into the settings on the Eve Launcher and disabled DirectX 12.
Helped tremendously.
Ah right, I forgot the good ol’ DX12 issues… although most players already dealt with that issue a while back. I still suspect an SDD will help the OP’s case, but just to be thorough here’s some other things you can check:
I was on DX12, gone back to 11 ill see if that helps, SSD if probably the main need though, althohg it hasnt always been this laggy so it used to run fine on a regular HDD
I didn’t track it too closely, but I recall that for years and years, EVE ran fairly lean on my PCs. I could get decent EVE performance even on my ‘backup’ PCs that were 5 years of upgrades behind my current PC.
In the past 3-ish years though, CCP has been on a “new graphics, new more detailed objects, new ship model upgrades, new UI, new yadda yadda yadda” kick. And it seems like they have no concern whatever for performance or efficiency anymore. Or possibly, no idea how to achieve it.
Fortunately memory, graphics and SSD upgrades have all become relatively cheap, or I think we’d see a lot more of these “black screen and lag” issues.
I remember years ago when EvE ran well even on a potato PC for the time, the only real thing causing performance issue being the clouds. The clouds could bring even a reasonably specced PC to its knees.
I still have PTSD from those damn clouds.