Devil May Cry 5 loading time benchmarks (PC vs Xbox Series S)

While writing the previous post I mentioned how extracting all of the PAK files in DMC5 SE would lead to worse loading times, as in theory, reading small compressed files and decompressing them in memory can be faster than reading the same files uncompressed.

I decided to do an exhaustive loading time comparison. And I threw in DMC5 SE on Xbox Series S into the mix as I was curious how that would fare in comparison. Now then, one important aspect is caching. As file data is read or written, Windows will store some of that data in a cache (depending on how often that data is accessed), which means reading file data for a second time may become drastically faster. So I did two benchmarks, one after a fresh reboot (which means there should be zero data cached), and another benchmark after restarting the game (which means it should be in an optimal state caching-wise).

What I decided to benchmark was all time spent in loading screens between the title screen menu and mission 2 gameplay on SoS difficulty (there are a total of five loading screens when doing this, which is a bit ridiculous). On the PC, the tests were done on an SSD with an average read speed of 2000 MB/s.

All PAKs extracted (no caching): 68.4 seconds
All PAKs extracted (with caching): 30.2 seconds

Normal install (no caching): 39.8 seconds
Normal install (with caching): 30 seconds

DMC5 SE on Xbox Series S (after starting console): 26.3 seconds
DMC5 SE on Xbox Series S (after restarting game): 16.3 seconds

After restarting the game, a normal install and PAKs extracted have extremely similar loading times, but with no cache to benefit from, then a normal install is much faster. And DMC5 SE is substantially faster than either PC install (I should note that the first DMC5 SE benchmark was done on mission 2 on LDK difficulty as I didn't have it unlocked on SoS, but I don't think that would lead to noticeable change in loading time).

One interesting thing I noticed during this was that certain loading screens have a static loading time. For instance, the loading screens before and after costume selection always last 2.2 seconds on PC. I suspect the real loading times for those two screens are actually much shorter and they're made artificially longer thanks to animations related to the loading screen itself.

I became even more certain of that when I noticed in the DMC5 SE version of the game, those loading screens behave in a different way. Several loading screens in DMC5 SE are replaced with fades to black. I think the game still loads data in the background, but it doesn't have to show any animation related to the loading screen which saves about 1 second per loading screen.

Update: I randomly started doing some more benchmark tests and now I'm getting much faster results on PC almost every single time, even after a reboot. This makes me think the cache is less important than I thought, and there might be something in my Windows 10 install which will do random disk access slowing everything else down (maybe Windows Defender?).