After starting my PC, launching certain games such as Victoria 3 and Factorio can take up to eight minutes. If I close the game and launch it again, the same game loads in roughly ten seconds. The games are installed on a 1TB NVMe SSD, not an older hard drive, and I usually have no other programs running. My system has a Ryzen 5 7600X, an ASRock AM5 motherboard, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, and a Radeon RX 7900 with 16GB of VRAM. Drivers are current, and the hardware should be more than capable. Could this indicate a hardware or motherboard problem, or is something else causing the unusually slow first launch?
2 Answers
A faster second launch is usually caused by Windows caching the game files in memory, so that part is normal. However, eight minutes is far longer than expected. Check Task Manager while the game is stuck loading and see whether the SSD is being heavily used. Windows Defender or another antivirus program scanning every file during the first launch can cause this exact pattern, so temporarily testing with an exclusion for the game folder may help. Also check the SSD's health with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo and make sure it is not nearly full, since some drives slow down substantially when they have little free space.
The motherboard is possible, but it should not be the first assumption based on the symptoms alone. Before replacing hardware, check SSD health, available storage, Windows Event Viewer, and whether the system is repeatedly rebuilding shader caches. A motherboard swap would only be worth considering if you also see unusually long system boot times, hardware errors, or other performance problems.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll check the disk activity, antivirus scanning, and the SSD’s remaining space.