Performance got worse

I play with a group of friends. 1 plays on Console while the rest plays on PC. Before 0.4 the performance on Console was pretty bad but all the PC players had no issues at all. 0.4 was supposed to improve performance, which for the one Console player in our ranks it did. But for all the PC players performance tanked since. Especially the loading time for maps went way up. We spent at least 3-5 times longer to load a map than before. For the cities its even worse. It takes like 5-10 times as long to load compared to 0.3.
Not sure what was changed... but it didnt work.

My experience is also that performance is worse.
On 0.3 I had 5 minutes of bad performance while shaders do their thing at each new map.
Now I have 3 minutes of absurdly bad performance and usually die on a slide show, but hey, CPU use is up!

Yea, I am having so many just stall out moments. Eventually the gears come up and I am back in but this is bad.

Unfortunately I'm having the same issue. In 0.3 everything was fine, now it takes me 45-60 seconds to load into a town. Yes, I have a crappy old laptop however, that wasn't an issue in 0.3. It's the performance "improvements" in 0.4 that made the game borderline unplayable for me.

load times does seem longer overall for me aswell. and almost every map/zone i have to wait for 2-3 minutes because my gpu utilization just stops and i get a stutterfest while its working on shaders. i can literally hear my gpu fans stop when i enter a zone and they start up again once its done working on shaders and its back to running fine.

I'm afraid, I have similar issues. Long load times to maps/to zones and sub-zones. When a zone is already loaded, I see the NPC name tags, but everything else is black. (using Vulcan btw). I would be okay with all of these, since we are in Beta, and there are things that need to be fixed, fine tuned etc. but game crushing on each time I Alt+Tab, to check on the trade site, or on a guide is not fun. These crushes got to the point, that if I want to do something more entertaining then looking at the loading screen for 2 minutes, I cannot switch to a website, because the game crashes in the middle of the loading screen. (even on game startup).

To sum up, as a casual player I would enjoy the game a lot, but these annoying crushes and long load times really ruining the experience for me.
I hope GGG can find the root causes of these issues and can fix them way before 1.0, as (in my opinion) they can lose a lot of potential players before the game even lunches.

have you count how many loading screens is total when done acts :D

lemme tell you, Alot :D:D

we need loading screen when entering stash pls

"

When a zone is already loaded, I see the NPC name tags, but everything else is black.

I have a similar issue. It's not black but some of the assets (including monsters, chests and animations) are invisible. Takes a good 3 minutes after loading screen for everything to show properly. Now again, I wouldn't complain about this if it was just a matter of my crappy laptop being too old for the game. But in 0.2 and 0.3 everything was fine. Feels like I got fucked for the benefit of console players.