Sorry about late upload bundle, but it is up now.

I've encoutered this months before lid blew on S&M and firmware updates were made available, so it's pretty clear this is not related to the latest intel fuckup.

I've played around with memory settings and upping speed from 2133MHz to 3600MHz on equivalent CL had almost no effect, so ditto on memory.

I am pretty sure this began with that larger patch that brough figters and bombers, or the one before, not sure which though.

Not sure it's game related when my old system fires up faster than yours, though.

Only relaying what i know and remeber :)

I really hoep some dev chimes in, since i've exhausted all troubleshooting steps on my end.

Hey there,

Yesterday, I installed the latest patches for windows 7 incl. the fixes for Meltdown (and Spectre - although I think it needs an firmware update). Then I tested the loading times again. They went up from 45s to 65s. 

Due to performance loss in other apps, I finally made the change to Win10. Loading times went down from 65s to 55s. Win 7 install before was fairly new, too. (under 6 weeks so I rule out a "fresh system" which'd be faster)

Game performance overall became really bad fps wise. Had no problem before on 1440p with best settings. Now, it feels sluggish. Even had some bad flickering which I read about before but hadn’t encountered yet. Anyway, I was able to solve it via deactivating v-sync. (using FRTC with freesync right now, multi monitor setup but I digress)

I really hoped to use this system for a couple of years more. Esp. as the hardware market is in such an dreadful state right now. 

I can only hope that we’ll see further performance tweaks. Game ran really smooth for me before. Even in late game on a massive map with tons of ships and AI. 

Just an update. 

I was able to solve my FPS issues and I got shorter loading times (48s atm). The culprit were the entire xbox services in Win10. 

Hohoho, it worked! Now at 21seconds.