@cyanidesunrise@zoner.work this used to be the case, but not since games stopped caring about hard disks and started targeting ssds, especially with directstorage. sounds weird but load times for individual assets are faster than a single frame gets rendered so the entire architecture for where assets are or in what order they're loaded had to be re-architected to support assets being partially loaded in and used. a surprising number of game engines that are targeting SSDs no longer have the concept of load priority or locality as a result, and instead have built the entire thing around data streaming rather than atomic loading.