Hi, I love your HD modpack, but I’m having some issues:
When loading the game, it takes a significantly larger amount of time compared to without this modpack.
That wouldn’t be as bad on its own, but the worst part is that it slows down my whole computer until it’s finished loading. I can hardly use my PC as Factorio is loading. I didn’t have these issues pre-2.0 when using the HD modpack, though I understand this contains a lot more textures.

I have 16 GB of VRAM and 32 GB of RAM, as well as a powerful CPU and GPU. I’m not sure how relevant it is, but in the in-game graphics settings, I have VRAM usage set to all, atlas size to largest, texture compression to high, and sprite resolution to high. Do you recommend changing any of these?

Is it possible to tweak any settings to fix this without affecting quality too much – or would it be possible to fix in an update? I wouldn’t mind the longer load time if my PC didn’t slow down considerably during loading.

Hi, I'm glad you like my mod.
To help you better, it would be great if you could provide me with a link to download your log file or you can post the contents of your log file here. You can find the factorio-current.log at:
Windows: C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Factorio
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/factorio
Linux: ~/.factorio

Thanks, but I figured it out: changing atlas texture size in the game’s graphics settings from ‘Largest possible’ to ‘8192’ made the game load faster and made it stop slowing down my computer.

Great, then have fun playing.
The Factory Must Grow!