How do video game loading screens work?

Question

What happens in the system as it loads the next area of a game?

In: 11

Answer 1

Data moves from the the hard drive to RAM.

That’s really it. The speed it moves across the northbridge, through the CPU into RAM is slower than the speed the CPU can talk to RAM while using it. Which is the entire reason we even have RAM rather than playing right off the hard drive.

Or, you know, it’s downloading stuff from the net. Which is far slower.