The lag spikes and a missing ceiling

[Cranky Old Man]

I have a minimum requirement setup (with a ATi Radeon HD 5870, not much RAM, and fairly old graphics drivers) but I know what my lag spikes come from after half an hour of testing.

It's not from SSAO or any of those graphics settings, because I tried turning ALL of that off and walk around a lot. The lag spikes depend on the quality of the textures, and they happen mostly when you load up the game, or when you load something - either new textures or audio. More on that later.

With high textures, even my regular frame rate takes a hit, so I don't know why those are recommended settings for my card. Maybe it would improve with updated graphics drivers.
With medium textures, the game runs okay, but lag spikes can still occur sometimes.
With low textures, the game seems okay.

...but I don't think the lag spikes has to do with my graphics card, to be honest. I think it has to do with the reading speed of my hard drive (that can take two minutes to save a simple LibreOffice Calc document), and the game loading in textures MID-GAME.
When I start the game, extremely low quality textures are loaded, and I have to wait awhile for the textures I ordered to load in all around me. This can take a few MINUTES, and you get lag spikes for every texture loaded in.

This also happens in between chapters, probably because new textures are loaded in at that point. I don't get why you won't load in the correct textures all at once at the loading screen, because if you did that, the lag spikes would be gone (at least for me).


My second "issue", I tried to screencap, but the game just took a picture of my Steam instead. It's about a missing ceiling, just outside of Cath's new lab (where you run a simulation on a dummy and find out that you're Reed). It's a bit in a corner in the dead end to the right, just as you exit the lab.


Thank you.