What we know about the Half Life 2 stuttering issue thus far

^eMpTy^ said:
it's definitely the main issue...I don't know why this thread is still open..
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some guy said:
A solution for the stuttering problem has been found and a fix is coming. I've been talking with Gary McTaggart (Valve) about this today and it turns out that my texture management theory was correct. A patch will be coming for this issue that will load all of the required textures into video memory on level load, rather than doing it during game play.
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Doesn't sound like autosave to me. Steam will be updated by tomorrow with a fix, says Valve.
 
^eMpTy^ said:
it's definitely the main issue...I don't know why this thread is still open..
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Maybe because Valve said it isn't? Because you can disable autosave, and still have it happen?
 
There are 2 problems

1) Quicksaves/Saves are excruciatingly slow when AA is enabled. Fixable but somewhat silly of them to miss this (since the docs to the function 'GetFrontBufferData' flat out say 'this function is extremely slow by design). They should have re-rendered the game to a smaller non AA texture for the thumbnail.

2) The game hitches when dynamically loading audio, also having the side effect of skipping up to a second or two of the audio. At home I had an A7N8X with a Geforce 5900 Ultra and it was fine, at work i have the same motherboard/CPU but with a Geforce 6800 and it has hitching problems (and its when I noticed the savegame problem since it defaulted to AA being enabled for the Geforce6 but not the FX).
 
I have a geforce 3 ti 200, abit KR7A athlon xp 2000+, 1 gig of 3200 DDR and using the onboard soundcard and did not have any stuttering, the level load times sucked, but gameplay was awesome. I have an older computer which is why i find it interesting people with much newer and faster comps are having this problem. Anyone with a comp somewhat like mine who isn't suffering from this too?
 
going out of the topic what is this 3dmark program i always hear about it i just dont know if its good to have it or not and if i can buy it at any computer store
 
I've decided to stop playing HL2 until they release this update -- the stuttering is definately annoying on my system (right now I just have my laptop)

Pentium-M 1.4GHz
1GB PC2700 memory
Mobility Radeon 9600 (64MB) GPU
Creative Labs Audigy 2 NX (USB 2.0) soundcard
 
GuruX said:
I've decided to stop playing HL2 until they release this update -- the stuttering is definately annoying on my system (right now I just have my laptop)

Pentium-M 1.4GHz
1GB PC2700 memory
Mobility Radeon 9600 (64MB) GPU
Creative Labs Audigy 2 NX (USB 2.0) soundcard
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www.futuremark.com

I've not had a problem. and I'll be running azerus in the BG while playing ;).
 
Macadami said:
I have a geforce 3 ti 200, abit KR7A athlon xp 2000+, 1 gig of 3200 DDR and using the onboard soundcard and did not have any stuttering, the level load times sucked, but gameplay was awesome. I have an older computer which is why i find it interesting people with much newer and faster comps are having this problem. Anyone with a comp somewhat like mine who isn't suffering from this too?
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Probably because you're not using the DX9 code paths and have much smaller textures (among other image quality losses).
 
Once again i sit waiting to see what happens, not encountering a single bit of suttering all the way through to chapter 13...so I dunno. :p
 
Anyone running a raptor drive running into this? The only stuttering I notice is right after a check point that starts a "load level" pause. Just a little bit of stutter coming out of the level load/save, then back to normal.

Other than that, I have had a few random freezes that crashed the comp (I think maybe 3 total)...

P4 Northwood 3.0
1gig
BFG 6800GT
74GB Raptor
 
Just purchased the game online.....fwiw, 80 mins to download, no sweat.

Stutters....bad. Definately a distraction......

System in sig - HDrives are Hitachi Serial ATA's. No RAID, etc; running off the chipset's SATA ports. Drivers updated.

I'll hope the patch arrives...soon....:rolleyes:

Regards - B.B.S.
 
joecuddles said:
If it's showing up not only in HL2 but also in Vampire : Masquerade, it may be an engine problem, I don't know how they'd fix that. Or how they never noticed it before released :confused:
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It should be fixable, don't know how, but I mean it better be fixable. I have refused to play on until it gets fixed. But what I would really really like to know is how a game gets released with the problem in the first place? I mean come on they only had an extra year from when it was first supposed to come out to fix any issues with the game, or finish it. I find it kind of shocking that a game can be called "Gold" when it has issues such as this. I only have 512 ram on my machine and I have always planned on upping it to 1 gig, but I mean come on Doom 3 doesn't do that crap. Sorry just speaking my mind a bit because I find it aggrevating that I have a dam good hardware system yet this game stutters.
 
himmy said:
What exactly is this hell that will be raised? Emailing Valve?
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I said hell would be raised, as in millions of angry customers. I never said they'd do anything, but they'll certainly be pissed off when their game that they've been waiting for for a year or more stutters constantly.
 
kurt454 said:
Not stuttering at all here. Sound is on medium. Running a Fortissimo III card. All video settings on highest setting.
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I'm running the same card and haven't had stutter problems either, other than the typical couple of seconds when a new level starts to load.
 
joecuddles said:
I said hell would be raised, as in millions of angry customers. I never said they'd do anything, but they'll certainly be pissed off when their game that they've been waiting for for a year or more stutters constantly.
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So, millions of customers will be angry and just sit at their computer?

Wow, really rasing hell.

For hell to be rasied, you would have to do something than just sit there and be angry.
 
Does it happen if you trun off all sound hardware acceleration and EAX? Does it work if you turn down the sound quality in DX? Does it happen if the soundcard is NOT sharing an IRQ with the SATA controller?
 
himmy said:
So, millions of customers will be angry and just sit at their computer?

Wow, really rasing hell.

For hell to be rasied, you would have to do something than just sit there and be angry.
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Is there a reason you feel the need to continue this branch of conversation? People will be pissed, and they'll hit forums with it, word of mouth will also travel quickly, people will be pissed, and are. That's all. Done with this now.

Back on topic, has the new update come out? Fix it for anyone?
 
joecuddles said:
Is there a reason you feel the need to continue this branch of conversation? People will be pissed, and they'll hit forums with it, word of mouth will also travel quickly, people will be pissed, and are. That's all.
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And this does exactly what?

Why am I asking this? Because you claimed a very stupid thing and you need to back it up.
 
I occasionally get framerate drops, but only when doing something that would also drop my frames in any other game (big explosions and such). I also have no unexpected frame rate drops with Bloodlines on my system.

Now Starwars Battlegrounds on the other hand.... Takes 2 minutes to launch the game, 3 minutes to load a level, and 1 minute to exit a level on my system (fine once your in the level though).

Otherwise all games (and I play ALL the big ones) are like butter on my system.

MoBo -- ABIT KV8 Pro
CPU -- AMD 64 3000+ Newcastle @ 240mhz (3400+ equivalent)
Video Card -- ATI Radeon x800XT-Platinum Edition @ 555/1150
RAM -- 1GB Kingston DDR PC-3200 (single stick)
CPUHSF -- ThermalTake Tower112 w/2 90mm fans
GPUHSF -- ThermalTake Extreme Giant III (w/ squirrel cage turned off).
Hdrive1 -- Hitachi 160GB 7200RPM SATA (Raid 0)
Hdrive2 -- Hitachi 160GB 7200RPM SATA (Raid 0)
PSU -- 480watt ThermalTake Silent PurePower
FAN Controller -- Coolermaster Aerogate I
Sound Card -- Audigy2 ZS Gamer
Case -- ThermalTake Xaser II A6000A
Monitor -- Hitachi CM772B 19" - 1600x1200@85hz
Speakers -- 900mhz Sony Wireless Headphones
DVD Drive -- Sony 16x DVD-ROM
 
forcemac101 said:
Anyone running a raptor drive running into this? The only stuttering I notice is right after a check point that starts a "load level" pause. Just a little bit of stutter coming out of the level load/save, then back to normal.
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I'm running great, with some level load stutters, but nothing that I woudn't expect from a game that was pushing what it is. I don't think it's your raptor that's crashing your machine. HD's don't usually do that. The data on them does. :)
 
Here's a couple of my screenshots-
and I'll post a couple pics of MY very own special little glitch.

citadelzap.jpg


and my glitch-

glitch.jpg


Kind of hard to see- but can you make all the vast numbers of little red lines? It doesn't show up in-game but in many of my screenshots it does. I suspect it has something to do with the interface between my 9800 pro 128 and my slightly outdated A7V8x motherboard. Via chipsets and so -on. I tried changing agp voltage from 1.5 through to 1.7 with no change. Also, when I set the game to high texture resolution, I get a similar problem to that guy with teh checkerboard- except that its multi coloured, more distorted and REALLY lags the game out. goes away if I pause or do an autosave.
Once it crashed the game. only time HL2 ever crashed on me- never had much trouble with stuttering although it did slightly cramp my enjoyment.

Any thoughts? do I have to re-download my textures?
 
got this quote at shack news from valve
There is a fix for the D3D texture manager sending textures down to the driver in the middle of the level. We now draw zero-area triangles with each texture on level load to force them down to the driver at that point. There's another fix that changes how we take screenshots for save game thumbnails that fixes the hitching after an autosave. The third fix that I'm still working on is to keep the NVidia texture management from blowing up. This causes extremely bad framerates from texture thrashing, and is also the cause of crashing on some machines.
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seems there are three bugs to fix, i can't help but wonder how would this texture thrashing have effected initial hl2 benchmarks, and how did this go unnotice, i mean damn there are a lot of people having this issue
 
Raptor RAID-0 Here Not really much in the way of stuttering on lvl load for me either.
 
I'm just running a single Maxtor 80GB SATA drive and applying the stuttering "fix" patch actually killed off the little skips I was getting after the loading screens and around autosaves......so something worked. :D
 
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