Right, just sat through two startups with the stop watch and task manager.
0:00 Click on icon
0:57 black window/screen pops up for as second and disappears again
1:52 black screen
2:02 “safe mode” query (always pops up with the steam version 
)
2:05 installation manager/check for update
2:40 further startup screens
4:50 menu
- The whole startup process seems to be heavily CPU limited. It’s single threaded almost throughout the process and that thread more or less permanently maxes out a core.
- There’s hardly any disk i/o measurable by task manager during any of the above phases. So if the taks manager is reporting correct data for access to my SSD I guess at least for quick startup the money for a new SSD is wasted.
- There is some internet usage, mainly in installation manager phase and after. But it’s not that much and only intermittently reaching speeds > 1 MB/s.
So, if my observations are correct, startup is mainly calculations. What there is to be processed every single time that couldn’t be pre-calculated is beyond me. If startup would concern itself mainly with moving data from disk to RAM (my naive idea of a startup process again) it would probably be finished in a few seconds - at least with an SSD.
And if the processing would turn out to be necessary it should be parallelized.