Overwatch heroes not loading

[jedi07890]

Hello everyone,

I have been playing overwatch, and I noticed that when I load in the game, it takes a while for the heroes to appear, including myself. I can see the map well, as well the name tags of people moving around, but not their heroes. I don't think it's a graphics cards issue (I have the ASUS Strix 960 2GB). I looked at my ram and noticed that while running battle.net and overwatch only, I have on average 6.25GB/8GB of ram being used. I don't think this is normal. From what I can see, I have a lot of cached memory/memory on standby.

Is this really a RAM issue? If not can anyone help please?
Thanks in advance!

 

[jr9]

- Try reinstalling the game, it may be slightly corrupted.

- Are you loading from an HDD? Sometimes slower mechanical drives are to blame for slow game asset loading.

- 6-7GB of RAM usage is not rare for gaming and there are other factors such as open processes. Try closing all applications, background programs with task manager and see if you can reduce your RAM usage.

 

[jedi07890]

- Try reinstalling the game, it may be slightly corrupted.

- Are you loading from an HDD? Sometimes slower mechanical drives are to blame for slow game asset loading.

- 6-7GB of RAM usage is not rare for gaming and there are other factors such as open processes. Try closing all applications, background programs with task manager and see if you can reduce your RAM usage.

Yes I am running from a WD Caviar Blue 1TB drive. The only things running were overwatch, discord and AVG both in the background, plus the system’s processes obviously. Is 6-7GB really representative of those processes?

I will try reinstalling/repairing the game see if it changes anything. I will let you know if anything changes.

 

[jr9]

- It's hard to say what kind of RAM usage is normal as there are countless programs and versions of each. 6GB seems normal to be in game even with few applications open. Hard to say as there are so many programs and versions of each. If you want, you can post a screenshot of your Resource Monitor sorted by private (KB) with the largest processes at the top. If you see all processes (programs with no GUI Window) under around 100MB then that should be fine. I would also have a look at CPU usage and see if anything is using over 10% when idle.

- The Disk tab in Resource Monitor is also useful for finding performance issues and this goes double for mechanical harddrives. See if there are any programs writing or reading to your disk heavily. The most common thing I spot is antivirus programs aggressively scanning and HDD and slowing it down significantly, or the Windows update service using the drive heavily as well. Something like this will cause performance issues. Consider trying to game with AVG disabled if it has any kind of active protection.

- Another thing, if you are getting high resource usage with no programs or processes visable in the resource monitor to explain it, malware can be present as it can hide itself from the OS but it still leaves a resource usage footprint. A safe mode malware scan in with a different antivirus like malwarebytes is a good way to check for this.

- For best performance in modern games, an SSD is a strong asset as they are far faster than HDD drives and they dramatically impact load times. You don't even need to reinstall your OS if you don't want to, just install the games on the SSD or move them.

 

[jedi07890]

So after I've tried scanning and repairing the game, but the even after that the issue is still present. Here is a screenshot of the ressource monitor without overwatch running: https://imgur.com/a/f8f5m . Thanks!

 

[jr9]

RAM section looks fine to me so RAM doesn't seem to be the issue. Try looking in disk next to see if you have something reading or writing to your disk a lot. Also give disabling/uninstalling your antivirus a try.

If scanning/repairing the game doesn't help, a complete uninstall and reinstall of Overwatch using the Battlenet client may help more if you didn't try this yet.

 

[jedi07890]

RAM section looks fine to me so RAM doesn't seem to be the issue. Try looking in disk next to see if you have something reading or writing to your disk a lot. Also give disabling/uninstalling your antivirus a try.

If scanning/repairing the game doesn't help, a complete uninstall and reinstall of Overwatch using the Battlenet client may help more if you didn't try this yet.

So I've completely re-installed overwatch as well as my antivirus. Sadly most of the time I still have loading issues. I took a screenshot of my disk activity without anything running here: https://imgur.com/a/fbMGG . Also, my friend doesn't have any issues of the sort, and we live in the same apartment so I don't think it would be an internet issue...
Thanks a lot for your help so far!

 

[jr9]

- Has this always been an issue or did it start recently? If it is recent or started all the sudden it could be the game that is the issue.

- Consider using selective startup in Windows to load the OS without anything except what you need to test the game. Disk usage looks high, Windows is doing a lot of background stuff.

- Issue seems to be well documented with the game and could be something needing to be patches. Many solutions exist on Battlenet. A support ticket may be an ideal route of action as they will know their game issues better and offer more solutions to them.

 

[jedi07890]

- Has this always been an issue or did it start recently? If it is recent or started all the sudden it could be the game that is the issue.

- Consider using selective startup in Windows to load the OS without anything except what you need to test the game. Disk usage looks high, Windows is doing a lot of background stuff.

- Issue seems to be well documented with the game and could be something needing to be patches. Many solutions exist on Battlenet. A support ticket may be an ideal route of action as they will know their game issues better and offer more solutions to them.

I haven't played the game for a couple months until last week, when the problem occured. I will try to submit a ticket and see where it goes! Although, I find it odd that Windows is doing a lot of stuff in the background... Is there a way to check what Windows is doing exactly, other than the weird process names in the task manager?
Thanks a lot!

 

[jr9]

Windows does a lot of things in the background even when it seems idle. In terms of disk activity, the disk activity section inside the Disk tab of resource monitor gives you a look at anything on the system that is writing to the disk and where it is writing to. Resource monitor can also tell you which processes are using the Internet and where the data is going to. Svchost is a part of Windows that is used by many services. You have fairly heavy disk activity from that process so if you want to know exactly what is going on, you could look and see where the data is being read from or written to by expanding the file column and see if there are any areas that are being accessed heavily. Disabling certain services that use service host heavily is another approach such as superfetch. SSDs make this automatic process much less taxing or even unnoticeable.

 

[flamoespoes]

Hey man, Just wanted to add that since the last update, I have experienced this in overwatch as well. Could be there is a slight problem with the patch itself?

 

[jedi07890]

Windows does a lot of things in the background even when it seems idle. In terms of disk activity, the disk activity section inside the Disk tab of resource monitor gives you a look at anything on the system that is writing to the disk and where it is writing to. Resource monitor can also tell you which processes are using the Internet and where the data is going to. Svchost is a part of Windows that is used by many services. You have fairly heavy disk activity from that process so if you want to know exactly what is going on, you could look and see where the data is being read from or written to by expanding the file column and see if there are any areas that are being accessed heavily. Disabling certain services that use service host heavily is another approach such as superfetch. SSDs make this automatic process much less taxing or even unnoticeable.

I've contacted Blizzard on the subject and did everything they suggested to me. Sadly it didn't fix the issue quite yet. It seems that I've been running into a few problems related to Windows (random blue screens when shutting down the computer for example) so I'll try contacting Microsoft now. I'll come back with the results once again!