What format are you trying to load it in? Sounds like you might be parsing text, which is never going to be fast; instead you should preprocess the model into a binary format that can be just loaded directly into buffers with a single fread.

Well, the thing is that I use Assimp.

What format are you trying to load it in? Sounds like you might be parsing text, which is never going to be fast; instead you should preprocess the model into a binary format that can be just loaded directly into buffers with a single fread.

Well, the thing is that I use Assimp.

You can still take your code that uses Assimp and move it into an external tool that you run ahead of time, which you can then use generate a simpler binary file that can be loaded quickly.

Huh.. Don't know why I didn't think of that, but thanks, I'll give it a try.

Sorry, I've been implementing terrain LOD and did not have time to profile my loading of the mesh. But when I do have time, this 22 MiB mesh will surely be interesting to load and render. I saw the sponza mesh everywhere. Pretty much anybody writing an engine has screenshots with it, but I never used it before. It will be a good stress test for my forward rendering of multiple point lights.

Btw.

When I said creating all textures, I mean the diffuse, normals and specular.