Why are the Menu screens so hideously slow in this game?

Loading areas and going from singleplayer to multiplayer takes a while, but I've never had issues with menus in-game. If you are, it's possible it's a hardware issue or drivers that need updating.

My specs:-

Intel Core i7 6850K
32GB DDR4 RAM
2x GTX 1080Ti's in SLI
1200w PSU
1440p monitor @ 144hz 
2TB Samsung M.2 NVMe 960 Pro SSD

Have no issues with menus in other games such as Battlefield 1, Dota 2, ME1, 2 and 3. Just ME:A. I very much doubt it's my rig. I also notice huge lag spikes in the Tempest war room after opening and closing consoles AVP/Apex Teams/Research Terminal and the weapons locker on the bridge. Out in the open, planetside there are no stutters at all. Just the other areas i mentioned.

Which menus are we talking about exactly?
There are a couple which load additional Objects (like the R&D terminal and Squad selection).
These are slow for me because the game is installed on a slow HDD.
(And these objects (weapons, armour, squad) don't seem to be cached)

I did also noticed, that at least some (/most?/all?) menus seem to generate an abnormal high CPU load.
Or maybe its the game in general that generates this overhead, idk.

Otherwise I have no problems with "lag".
ps:
Exception being speeding around Kadaraa, that hangs for a short time when loadin a new area.
pps:
lolSPlag, Biovar Pls

The "building shaders" text is from when people complained about wait times in loading screens. The answer was to show people what was happening during the loading screens.

Crap. That really sucks. I hope soneone can figure out a fix for you.

That is weird now that u mention it since Battlefield 1 runs in DX12 and this game is using the exact same graphics engine.

I have slightly less power in my laptop, but very minimal lag, usually only when I go from single- to multiplayer or vice versa. Is the game definitely utilising your rig properly?

I doubt it is your system.
More likely than not it is software:

Since you are in SLI mode... do you have VSync off or on?
May want to try the opposite of what it is set too.

If that is not the issue:
Do you have PhysX in the Nvidia Control Panel (NCP) enabled or disabled?
Again try the opposite.

Also in the Nvidia control panel have you set up custom graphic settings?
If so reset everything back to default and check the boxes of the options in the NCP to application controlled .

Foregoing those possibilities... there could be an hardware issue.
I would run some bench-marking on the two graphic cards when in use in tandem.
See if the graphic cards are sharing the work load equally or is one card doing the majority of the work while the other just idles.
Also check to make sure the fans are running smoothly and not heavily coated in dust and dirt.

It could be some games don't like sli.

The menus are indeed much slower than, let's say, DA:Inquisition. I kind of got used to them but after spending 100+ hours in Andromeda and going back to Inquisition I was surprised how light DA:I feels. Everything was opening so fast, no hitching in the menus, no waiting, no slowdowns.

When you open console with "~" button and write command "perfoverlay.drawgraph 1" you will enable small graph in the bottom left corner that shows your CPU, GPU and Disk usage. Whenever I open or close menu in Andromeda (any menu, like pressing ESC, M or J during the game), there's a very huge spike in CPU usage. I don't have that problem in ANY other game, Inquisition works butter smooth on ultra settings. I also play other new games like The Surge, Tales of Berseria and they all work flawlessly.

What I noticed, however, is that Andromeda likes to "stutter" when some graphical settings are too high. Normally stuttering is caused by things like textures loading and so on, because the actual textures have to be loaded from the disk. However, that is not the case in Andromeda. I'm willing to say, that EVERY graphic setting in this game can cause heavy stutter when it's set too high. Most of the menu slowdown went away when I dropped my settings to mix of Medium/High with only textures on Ultra (there's no performance improvement to me with lower textures quality and the faces look awfully blurry even on High).

There are no viruses on my PC, I have all drivers installed and up to date. No bullsh*t running in the background, I actually keep my PC very clean. I don't want to sound like a d*ck but honestly, I guarantee you that there is NOTHING wrong with my PC. I'm actually the one usually helping others fix their performance issues so you can trust me that I tried a lot of stuff. I think I spent about 40 hours on trying to make this game run good.

So yeah, it's the game. PROBABLY caused by lack of RAM, considering how RAM-hungry Andromeda is. I noticed that Andromeda might be actually be the first game to TRULY require at least 16GB of RAM. I mean, yeah, I know that 16GB is the recommended value, but let's be honest - no other game actually required that much so far. As I said, I'm a heavy gamer, I play all kinds of genres, I have hundreds of games, yet Andromeda is the first one to truly eat RAM so much. I went through all kinds of subreddits, forums, EA Answers HQ, NeoGaf threads and so on and I noticed one thing. Majority of people who have problems with stuttering and menu slowdowns have 8GBs of RAM (and usually GTX 970, which has this weird VRAM issue, where in theory it's 4GB but actually 3.5GB). This combo is actually the same as mine and my girlfriend's PCs. And yes, we both suffer from this issue with Andromeda :/ You, on the other hand, shouldn't have that problem, but there you go. That's the Andromeda :/ I think there is memory leak but I don't want to start that conversation just to be jumped by 10 other people screaming at me "BUY NEW PC, YOU SCRUB! I DON'T HAVE THAT PROBLEM SO GAME IS FINE". 

That would depend on Nvidia or AMD, as SLI happens in the driver, not the game.

I get large FPS drops in the AVP/Strike Team room on the Tempest on my i7 6700K and GTX 1080 Ti. MSI Afterburner points at a GPU usage overload being the culprit.



Funny, the trilogy didn't have this problem. Shaders were cached in a file on the hard drive/SSD. Never understood why Andromeda constantly rebuilds the shaders when I don't change anything in the settings.