"Parallel sprite loading failed" slowing load to menu

[DomNomNom]

Often (~50% of the time) when I launch Factorio, it takes twice as long as usual to get to the main menu. (no mods)
Digging into the logs myself, I found that in the times it was slow, an error like this was added:

Code: Select all

   2.246 Error ParallelSpriteLoader.cpp:223: Parallel sprite loading failed (__base__/graphics/decorative/red-desert-decal/red-desert-decal-07.png): .
RAM: 13773/65373 MB, page: 17527/66171 MB, virtual: 87535/8388607 MB, extended virtual: 0 MB
Falling back to normal sprite loading.

Note that the particular sprite that is failing varies from launch to launch.


Thank you for pointing out Event Tracing for Windows which allowed me to find a possible culprit. Lining up the timestamps in the logs shows that sprite loading fails shortly after a New Process "Nvidia Share.exe" occurs.

nvidia share culprit maybe.PNG (47.96 KiB) Viewed 862 times

After disabling the NVidia "In-game overlay" (as titled in Geforce Experience) it now loads quickly without the error.

EDIT: Sadly it seems to load slowly sometimes even when the overlay is disabled.

I wish you luck finding out why that's interrupting your sprite loading. Maybe re-trying without falling back to non-parallel upload solves the issue.

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the report however that's working exactly as intended. Parallel loading is an optimization which *should* work but if it fails the game falls back to serial loading.

On your computer for some reason it fails commonly. But it falls back correctly and loads. That's all working as intended.

If you ever figure out why it fails you can get it fixed on your computer or you can just disable parallel sprite loading so it always uses the slow loading path.