This is a general message for all XNA developers that in XNA 4 it takes typically 1 – 1.5 seconds to create a new BasicEffect object, while only about 100 milliseconds to create an AlphaTestEffect object. So if your load times are horrible and…
Read more at http://blog.danskingdom.com/xna-basiceffect-takes-1-second-to-initialize-alphatesteffect-0-1/