Audio Problems with HL2

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Bored again so I made another stupid picture while I wait for Valve to fix HL2:

HL2_scatmang.jpg
 
Guess I'm not the only one with this problem then. SBLive5.1, 640MB, GFFX, welcome to Stutter City. Honestly I expected a boxed retail copy of HL2 to work a lot better than this. The coast sections are virtually unplayable right now, so I guess a lot of people are waiting for Valve. Again.
 
95% of all audio delays were solved by starting HL2 with -heapsize 384000 -console parameters. The teleporter scene is nearly w/o stutters now, At least not w/ those which were worth speaking about. /me playing HL2 now :D ( i have 512mb RAM installed )
 
Radeon 9800 Pro, SB Live 5.1, P4 2,53Ghz CPU. Asus mobo.

Problem is here too. Tried everything including the Omega drivers for my Radeon, it did help a bit but still stuttering and the sound isn't really playing that "fresh" meaning it just doesn't sounds well.

I'm not even going to try to continue playing this game untill Valve comes up with a decent patch to fix the problem. I want to experience and enjoy this game without any problems.

Hurry hurry Valve, would be nice if I could play it tomorrow (although I doubt they're working in the weekend).
 
I think they'd probably have at least a few people in overtime over the weekend to try to fix it. Unless they're not really doing anytihng and just hoping someone else finds a solution.
 
Hi,

So were now on day 5 of this problem and still no patch. Well that’s not so bad because at least VALVe have admitted there is a problem (even if saying “a few people” was a little understated) and there working on a fix, which is acceptable for me.

The question I’m asking myself now is, are they going to work the weekend? I have almost a whole weekend of doing nothing (I work evenings) and was looking forward to playing this game. So what’s the chance that there’s gonna be a fix before the end of the weekend? Does anyone know if VALVe are going to work over the weekend seeing as this is such a major issue?

Jak
 
Just to chime in that I also suffer from this problem too. It's not as bad as it is for some people, but it is there, and it does (unfortunately) harm the immersion of the game.

Which is a shame, because it's like having the world's finest novel with sentences repeated on the same page occasionally, or the greatest film with a brilliant script where actors recite the same lines too. In other words, Half-Life 2 is a technical and artistic marvel plagued by a problem which can on occasion severly cut into the immersion of its experience.

Anyway, the sound problem happens to me whenever a large cache of sound files are loaded in. For example right before you exit the plaza at the beginning of the game (as Breen is talking for a second time on the video screen), when the guard asks you to pick up the can, he usually ends up doing it four or five fractured times...

And this happens when Breen is giving one of his speeches in Water Hazard too. The problem also becomes (mostly) more recurrent later on in the game during the final third.

However, during Ravenholm, Coastline and Dark Energy, the game is fine and stutter free for the most part.

I've replaced my video drivers three times (4.11 cats, 4.10 cats. 2.5 Omegas), updated my Realtek AC97 driver twice, altered program/system usage in XP to minimum apart for Half-Life 2, played with my BIOS settings and modified the config file.

The greatest success I had was in modifying the config file, so thank you to the people in this thread for the information I used. Having said that, although the stuttering is reduced, it's still there, and it can become quite bad at times.

I've been hearing this is a Source problem and it's occured in CS: Source, HL: Source and Bloodlines too. I also remember watching the E3 2004 scene set of Half-Life 2 filmed on camera, and it happened a couple of times.

I'm just surprised this got through QA when a whole bunch of specifications must have been tested. It's not as if we all have the same hardware setups, video and sound drivers, so if it is an engine problem... And Source has been built with this sound compression technology in mind, I'm not holding my breath for a quick easy fix. :(

It's a pity because Half-Life 2 is such a stellar game. Technically sumptious apart from this one small, but significant thing (in my opinion of course) plaguing it.
 
Doppleganger said:
Just Google Creative SB Live and you should get some joy. I think the latest drivers are still the ones released in 2003. You could also go here and get this driver www.kxproject.com Mainly musicians that use this but it works fine for games too (until HL2 that is :p)


Thanks Doppleganger, I thought they hadn't released any new drivers! I will try the link you suggested though!!!

As an update on me downloading the omega drivers, they work fine and no slow down on the desktop. Did they solve the stuttering? Did they Sh**e!!!!!
 
Hey, I did -heapsize 384000 (I have 512mb in total) and it is almost running smooth now. Actually it runs smooth, just sometimes it has to load for the sounds. But I'm already happy since it's playable. :afro:
 
I'm loving the photoshop work guys!

Papa's got a brand new lag, ahahahahhaha.
 
Jonny_Hermit said:
That pic reminds me of the fat Doom3 Zombies.

Now cmon, that was rude. He looks good! A bit tired and overworked but other than that, perfectly p-p-p-p-p --eachy :)
 
rilla said:
Hey, I did -heapsize 384000 (I have 512mb in total) and it is almost running smooth now. Actually it runs smooth, just sometimes it has to load for the sounds. But I'm already happy since it's playable. :afro:

:LOL:
 
arkanis said:
[funny picture here]

:LOL:

sorry for overusing that smiley, but i'm in a stage beyond annoyment and pure hate and desperation, and now i'm only able to laugh brainlessly
 
Guys,

I am too having this audio stuttering issue. It's more like a memory usage issue, since the game is freezing while it fetches info from my hard drive (page faults). For some reason, this game is only using 300 MB of RAM at all times instead of my FULL 1 GIG OF RAM!! I hope valve works through this problem throughout this weekend.
 
Just thought I'd better add my name to 'the few' - you never know, this post might tip it over in to the realms of 'quite a few'.

I can't believe I'm having the exact same problem I had 5 years and 3 PCs ago with the original - you couldn't make it up ;(
 
Hello. =)

Mahaha *lol* you all know what?
It's a little bit strange but I must say: I find this is a cool situation (in a little ill kind :cheese:)!

I read all the posts here since the beginning (I was so calmed down that I was not the only one with this problem) and first...
ok, we were all dissapointed. Then we were very angry about valve AND dissapointed. And now... I read so cool posts
and see so funny pictures about valve, that I can't be furious anymore. :stare:

This thread brought many people together... all with the same problem, many with solution-tries and (above all) people from all over
the world (greets from germany here ;)) and I know... it will be a great feeling in the future, when I will click in this link and read posts
from a holy **** many people: "YEEES, THE PATCH IS HERE!!! EVERYONE CAN PLAY IT NOW!"
I just want to say: I love you all. =)

I hope we all have a great time here further. May valve bring the patch soon so we can rock their unbelievable game!!! =)

BRING IT ON, VALVE!!! ;)


Greets, DarkJedi
 
Bump!!!

add me to the stuttering problems... was so looking foward to playing this.... hope valve finds it quick...
 
tdarkjedik said:
it will be a great feeling in the future, when I will click in this link and read posts
from a holy **** many people: "YEEES, THE PATCH IS HERE!!! EVERYONE CAN PLAY IT NOW!"

When? Patch? Don't be so sure, this problem is alot more complicated than alot of people seem to think, it's not an easy or magical fix waiting to be found by Valve, it's a serious problem with the way textures and sounds are streamed in addition to that I've received word from a Valve employee that it has to do with the fact that sounds and textures are often carefully timed to load at the same time.
 
MeanWhile said:
When? Patch? Don't be so sure, this problem is alot more complicated than alot of people seem to think, it's not an easy or magical fix waiting to be found by Valve, it's a serious problem with the way textures and sounds are streamed in addition to that I've received word from a Valve employee that it has to do with the fact that sounds and textures are often carefully timed to load at the same time.

Yeah, this is why it often happens when turning corners, or when the scene changes in the G-Man's intro. I think part of the problem is it's trying to sync them, but it has to slow down to extract things from the GCF. Anyone tried unpacking textures as well as sounds yet?
 
Theres some 67.02 beta drivers out for the nvidia cards that were used in a benchmark.
I was just wondering has anyone tried these out and had any success?
 
Same problem. Audio stuttering. Tried everything posted here plus various drivers including beta ones. I finished the game but the stuttering annoyed the f**k out of me. I'd like to play it again in stutter free mode. When the new nvidia stereo drivers come out I'll play it in 3D too.
 
Older Drivers Fixed Mine!

Here is what I posted on the huge steam forum thread:
http://www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=1566621#post1566621
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MINE IS FIXED!!!!

Hey, someone posted earlier like back on page 22 or 23 (40 posts per page), that they had two systems, one with older drivers that ran perfectly and one with new drivers that was studdering.

Well, I have 3 systems here in my room. I have installed and played the game on 2 of them. To my suprise, my lower end system ran the game perfectly with no hitches. The only lag I would ever see is from the weak video card not being able to handle highish settings. Lowering settings on this system will make it run perfect.

I have determined that my source of the studdering or graphical pauses was infact a video driver issue. I know alot of people have extreme audio studder that may or may not be graphic related. On my newer system, I always had the weird studder right when the G-Man at the intro starts saying "come again" and at the same time the background scene was changing, which I believe to be the cause of the audio studder. Of course I had small pauses with autosaving and after loading zones as well.

So my older system specs are as follows:
2.5ghz p4
768 ddr266 ram
WindowsXP Pro with SP2 using DX9.0c
geforce 4 ti4200 128mb 8xAGP
(using older drivers 45.23) cause my friends play alot of SoF2 on it and those are very compatible with that game.

To my amazement the game ran with no audio or graphical pauses on this system. I knew it had to be due to the really old driver. The funniest part is that right before I start the game Steam spits a warning at me about using an out of date driver and that it may cause problems. I went ahead anyway and it was the first time I saw the game's intro run perfectly.

So here is what I did... I uninstalled the 4.9b catalyst drivers on my good system and reinstalled the oldest driver I found that supports the X800 series, which was the 4.5cats. Again Steam warned me about my out of date driver, lol. But now the intro runs nearly flawless as compared to before. I went through the whole beginning of the game past the teleport part and never saw any hitches like I was experiencing before. Keep in mind I also have autosave disabled already to prevent those hitches. I had already tried just about every solution posted here or on the websites people have made. None of the other solutions really made any difference for me. Downgrading the driver definately made it perform as I would expect with the settings I use. Heck, even the weird 3-5 seconds worth of hitching after a loading screen is all but gone. I may consider reenabling autosave just to see how much better that is now too.

Thank you to whomever posted earlier about downgrading to the 4.7cats and fixing his problem. I didn't think it would work for me, but it made the game play on my system the way it was intended to play.

I know this won't fix everyone, but I know it works on the 2 systems I have played on with older drivers. This would also explain why not everyone has these issues, since I am sure there are plenty of folks out there using fairly old drivers. I am sure this has to do with what people have been saying about how the game was supposed to be released a year ago, so it would make sense that it runs better with an older driver.

Here is my good systems specs:
------------------------------------------
Pentium 4 CPU 3.0GHz @ 3.0 - Hyperthreading Enabled
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
2x512MB(1GB)Dual Channel PC3200 OCZ Platinum EL Series
Using Onboard SoundMAX Audio
120GB Western Digital SATA HDD
40GB Western Digital IDE HDD
HIS Excalibur X800 Pro IceQ II 256mb(*!!!4.5 Catalysts!!!*)
Samsung CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
Coolermaster Aero 4 CPU fan @ 2400rpm (70F-90F)
Silver Aspire X-Dreamer II Case with 7+ extra fans
Zalman multi-fan controller
Antec Trueblue 480W PSU
Viewsonic G90fb 19" CRT
Klipsch Promedia GMX A-2.1 Speakers
Logitech MX Duo Wireless Keyboard
Logitech MX510 Pro Gaming Mouse
Windows XP Pro- SP1(running minimum services) using DirectX 9.0c
-------------------------------------------

Now I know valve will find out the same thing, yet they will probably never suggest people go to an earlier driver. So basically they either need to patch it to make it work right with newer drivers, or wait for ATI to come out with something that works. This also explains why some people were able to fix their issues using Omega drivers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

P.S.- I never had to disable any codecs or decompress the game files. I tried every other fix out there other than those two, until I found it to be the driver issue. I doubt it was a combination of all those fixes and the old driver, because I didn't do anything to my older system at all, it worked perfect right off of steam with no tweaking.

Also someone asked what settings I run on my good system. I run High everything, 4xAA, 8xAF, 1280x1024, Reflect World, Sound set back to High after fixing the driver issue. These were the suggested defaults for my specs.
 
I just thought I should share some information I gathered about how I
successfully removed all video and audio stuttering from Half-life 2 where all other attempts had failed. After installing the latest ATI catalyst drivers (4.11 11/10/04)

I set my display card as follows in the "Graphic settings/3D" section

Standard settings - Use custom settings

Anti-Aliasing - Let the application decide

Anisotropic filtering - Let the application decide

Catalyst A.I - High

Mipmap detail level - High Performance

TRUEFORM - Quality

Smartshader - None

And here is the setting that stopped the sound stutter. Everything I did in the game, including lower quality settings, lower resolution
had no effect either. None of the helpful hints about changing the HL 2 config file, or lowering the hardware acceleration in windows worked either.

In the API Specific - Direct3D settings - Tick the "Support DXT texture formats", and leave the other settings in the API Specific window un-ticked.

PC setup

P4C800-E Deluxe

3.2Ghz P4

1GB Duel channel

280GB SATA HD

ASUS ATI RADEON 9800XT

Creative Audigy 2 soundcard

I hope this helps at least some of you get the game running as it should
 
I understand that Valve is trying to play down the severity of this bug but it's kind of rude to say it only happens to a small number of users!

"A small number of Half-Life 2 customers have been experiencing problems while playing the game, and we have traced these issues to corrupt Steam cache files."

A small number of users?!!!! how about the fact that most people don't realise what the problem is. The other ones that do don't go to this site. Other than that, I suppose it's a small number. This thread is evidence enough.

That BS bothers me. My game was running relitively smoothly but I could benifit from patches like anyone else. My sympathys to those who havn't even gotten a chance to play HL2 due to crashing.
 
Lifeform38 said:
In the API Specific - Direct3D settings - Tick the "Support DXT texture formats", and leave the other settings in the API Specific window un-ticked.


I can't find these in either the Catalyst control panel or the Direct X settings (under Direct3D)...am I missing something? I have the latest Omega drivers and latest DirectX...
Cheers
 
Just posted this over at steampowered - but I've got much better results from using older drivers. On a GeForce 5900 Ultra with the 6x.xx drivers, it's unplayable. With the 45.23s, it's almost perfect. A real turnaround for me. If you have an older card, give it a go.
 
I have this problem as well. :frown:

I hope they fix it (is it a problem with the game, or modern video card drivers?)
 
defragging

Hi,

I just stumbled across this thread from slashdot. I didn't know anyone else was having this problem. I have Audigy 2, a real bad Geforce 4MX (which is what I thought it was), 2800 AMD, 512 RAM.

I defragged my harddrive last night because I thought that might have been a problem (I'm not one to defrag that much either, but for this game anything) but it didn't help. Thought I'd mention that.

I did lower most of my settings and the stutters and load times both decreased. But are still very prevalent. Doom 3 works fine for me on almost the highest options.
 
I was having the mermory error and some stuttering before, I did the steam check and was obviously corrupt, because it immedicatley played on my machine. Before this it would not play without crashing to either the steam or half life menu or to the desktop. Well i played for about 25 min and got to a point where i quick saved then the game immediatley saved itsself, and low and behold the same issues. Stuttering sound then the boot to the steam menu, the half life menu never comes back now when it crashes, it always crashes to steam now. I can get it to play from 10-25 min. I am not overcllocked in any way and i will give my stats below. I still think this stuttering bug they are working on , AND the save feature are to blame. I fortunatley have two nice machines and can play on the other (albeit not my first choice) but what to all those that can't. FIX IT PLEASE AND SOON VAVLE! The majority of people would be willing to provide feedback so it can be fixed soon.

THanks wanting to play on from the prison.

OLBaID

SYS SPecs
XP PRO SP1
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (Bios 1008-D)
Nforce 4.27
1536 Geil Golden Dragon PC3200 @ 400mhz
2 Hitatchi 120G SATA HD in RAID 0
AIW 9800 PRO (CATALYST 4.11)
Dell 2001FP Digital Display
 
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