Half Life 2 Stutters The Movie

Ruben

Ruben

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I made this little movie to show you guys how bad it is. This is what i am experiencing with the game, and im sure some folks will agree that this is how it is on their systems.

I do not speak for all, only for me. Its to show you, and hopefully Valve how bad it can be for some gamers. It goes up and down, but this level is never completely stutter free, on one occation i only experienced 2 short stutters after a few tests with this level. This one i just recorded one time. I started the game and loaded this level up and proceeded to play.

The stutters have nothing to do with that i am recording it. My system can handle it. This is what i get very often in the game, and no recording device running.

Note that this is not for the modem user, this is a small file (about 5 mb). Its a 512k windows media stream embedded in the web page.

Enj-j-j-j-j-joy.

http://home.broadpark.no/~krhagen/
 
Wow dude, I'm assumeing you have a better computer than me, and I run it way better than that, even with everything on high :eek:

My condolences.
 
ouch...i'm sorry dude. I have a crappy computer with low settings everything, but it wasn't that bad for me.

what are your system specs, just curious...
 
Ruben said:
(if i had a bad system i could not make this snippet now could i?) : )
Click to expand...
sure you could.
even i can rendern high quality
so this would have been no problem for you if u had had a low end rig :)

but i feel sad for you
it runs better on my machine then this :(
poor you
 
What's your spec by the way?

Have you shut down background processes and anything else that maybe hogging memory/proccesor cycles? I found Anti-Virus software caused some slow down in Half-Life 2.

Also are your drivers all up to date?
 
I run everything on medium, sound also. I run the game of a SATA disc. I have tweaked my system for gaming, i run the machine with minimum resources. (95 mb ram usage at boot). I have a regular defragment every week. And i am not running any anti virus or any unessesary services.

AMD XP 3000+
Abit NF7-S v2
512 mb 3200 ram @ 400 fsb
ATI radeon 9800XT 256
 
You guys are totally missing the point. He's documenting the problem that many many people have. Even Valve has finally acknowledged that it's a problem:

"We're also investigating a solution for the sound skipping problems a small number of users are running into. We'll have a solution for this as soon as possible."

So, thanks, Ruben. Now I know just how serious the stuttering problem really is.

(what kind of sound card do you have?)
 
Ruben said:
I run everything on medium, sound also. I run the game of a SATA disc. I have tweaked my system for gaming, i run the machine with minimum resources. (95 mb ram usage at boot). I have a regular defragment every week. And i am not running any anti virus or any unessesary services.

AMD XP 3000+
Abit NF7-S v2
512 mb 3200 ram @ 400 fsb
ATI radeon 9800XT 256
Click to expand...

To be honest I'd cut down on the old defragmenting, it can damage your HDD if you do it too often. Have you tried swapping Hard Drives out? The game might be having problems reading from your disk, do you experience anything like this in any other games?
 
I have the same problem, audigy sound blaster 2 or something i have, i dont know much about sound cards. But i know HL2 doesnt like winamp in the background, it plays all my music really fast lol. I get the stuttering regularly also, not to that extreme though.

I suggest turning on the subtitle things, i did that, at least i can follow whats going on!
 
No.. this is the first time i have experienced this. Appart from the odd framerate issue i had with running on my old computer a while back, but NEVER ever like this. The game is beautiful and i hate to loose out on what could be a wonderful experience. My system i think is good. Its a regular consumer computer by comparison. A good midrange homebuilt rig.

Although i have an onboard sound card (NForce2 Soundstorm) that should not be a problem. A company like valve does not produce a computer game that cant run on a large number of computers, or do they? Well.. anyhow.. i run other games fine. Doom3 as an example, or Farcry ... i run them perfectly fine, medal of honor pacific assault runs like a charm aswell! I dont get it!

I will try and install teh game on C: instead, although that is a disc which holds the system and its slower than my SATA disc. Although, my C: runs at UDMA mode 5 which most users who game runs it on i presume.
 
Ruben said:
I made this little movie to show you guys how bad it is. This is what i am experiencing with the game, and im sure some folks will agree that this is how it is on their systems.

I do not speak for all, only for me. Its to show you, and hopefully Valve how bad it can be for some gamers. It goes up and down, but this level is never completely stutter free, on one occation i only experienced 2 short stutters after a few tests with this level. This one i just recorded one time. I started the game and loaded this level up and proceeded to play.

The stutters have nothing to do with that i am recording it. My system can handle it. This is what i get very often in the game, and no recording device running.

Note that this is not for the modem user, this is a small file (about 5 mb). Its a 512k windows media stream embedded in the web page.

Enj-j-j-j-j-joy.

http://home.broadpark.no/~krhagen/
Click to expand...
this is exactly how my pc runs the game as well. It was considerably less when I tried the things in "Possible fix for stuttering" thread, but that messed the sound up a little bit.
 
Yeah, couple quick questions, Ruben:
1.) Whats the RPM and cache ratings on your hard drive that HL2 is on?
2.) How much RAM do you have?
 
Vigilante said:
this is exactly how my pc runs the game as well. It was considerably less when I tried the things in "Possible fix for stuttering" thread, but that messed the sound up a little bit.
Click to expand...

WhiteZero said:
Yeah, couple quick questions, Ruben:
1.) Whats the RPM and cache ratings on your hard drive that HL2 is on?
2.) How much RAM do you have?
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is clean without any tweaks. I tweaked it a bit like in that thread, but it messed up the sound, got async and stuff, and the mixahead thing just messed up the dialogue. Its not a fix. This is a bug in the game engine i believe. Something is wrong. My system is good enough for other games so i dont think its a performance issue. This i think is about how source renders and fetches sound files and constantly syncing scripted events up.

Why the frame stops is because when the game needs to sync one thing up it needs to stop teh other. Either sound or graphics.

As for the RPM its 7200 and the cashe is 8 mb. I have 512 mb 3200 ram @400 fsb.
 
Hmm...

I found that if i had the res higher than 1024 768 it would have that kind of shuddering problem so when I put it to 1024 768 it ran just fine with a few stops here and there.
 
As long as you dont have a 5200RPG harddrive then there no other reason but a bug for this.
Weird. I don't have studdering, other than when it auto-saves.
 
Wow yours is alot worse than mine is, but the major stutters are in the exact same place, food for thought valve. If this was an issue with someone's setup the stutters would not appear in identical places, there are obviously coding issues at certain points in the game.
 
Ruben said:
I made this little movie to show you guys how bad it is. This is what i am experiencing with the game, and im sure some folks will agree that this is how it is on their systems.

I do not speak for all, only for me. Its to show you, and hopefully Valve how bad it can be for some gamers. It goes up and down, but this level is never completely stutter free, on one occation i only experienced 2 short stutters after a few tests with this level. This one i just recorded one time. I started the game and loaded this level up and proceeded to play.

The stutters have nothing to do with that i am recording it. My system can handle it. This is what i get very often in the game, and no recording device running.

Note that this is not for the modem user, this is a small file (about 5 mb). Its a 512k windows media stream embedded in the web page.

Enj-j-j-j-j-joy.

http://home.broadpark.no/~krhagen/
Click to expand...

just checked out your video. almost exactly the same here, i get complete lockup for 5-10 seconds and then that sound loop...bummer
 
I know you are trying to help (Chickenbum) but that does nothing. I always use omegadrivers and I still get the issue as do hundreds of other people who get this issue.

Personally I think anybody who stumbles across their solution merely does so by coincidence. The engine is unstable, it's a fact and no amount of driver reinstallations, hardware swapping, console commands is gonna miraculously solve the problem.

Having said that it's always wise to keep up to date and tweak your machine for optimal performance. The reason I know this is because I'm a tweaking enthusiast and my performance is phenomenal in pretty much all games, except this one.

I'm not having a go, it's just that these "solutions" are really nothing of the sort.
 
Try increasing ur heap size! Its defaulted to 64! go to the steam, my games, right click on the hl2 icon, go to start up properties, in the box add the command -heapsize (half teh amount of ram u have) then add 000 (thre zeros) to the end of that number.
so mine is "-heapsize 512000" it sets my heapsize to 500mb
 
That movie is exactly how mine operated before I did some of the tweaks. Now I have to run on 2-speaker setup (otherwise I can't hear sounds behind me very well), and medium sound quality and all the tweaks at tweakguides.com

This game is so incredible though. Just this one, very annoying problem.
 
Interesting dude - and your movie has put my own performance issues into perspective. In truth, while my game does jitter in new areas it remians quite playable. You seem to be experiencing the same problems as me but in a far more extreme manner. Hope they patch this game soon - particularly for people like you.
 
yar....played through the whole game like that...


Only happend at certain points though.
 
Ruben said:
I run everything on medium, sound also. I run the game of a SATA disc. I have tweaked my system for gaming, i run the machine with minimum resources. (95 mb ram usage at boot). I have a regular defragment every week. And i am not running any anti virus or any unessesary services.

AMD XP 3000+
Abit NF7-S v2
512 mb 3200 ram @ 400 fsb
ATI radeon 9800XT 256
Click to expand...

Maybe your problem is that you dont run any anti virus programs? Do you run Win XP SP2?? If your computer is full of viruses and other things you get from inet., your computer will be slow.
 
I have very similar specs and it works well. I DID experience problems at first, but lowering textures to medium helped a lot. Also, 1024x768 is my sweet spot.
Just a note, if you were using Fraps to make that movie it would definately affect performance.

AMD XP 2700+
nforce2
512mb
ATI Radeon 9800(all-in-wonder)
 
*Just watched video, didn't read rest of through*

I have nearly the same system as you, and have absolutely no problems like that. I'm running the 4.12 catalyst beta drivers. Those should be on the www.ati.com website somewhere. I'm running the game at 1280x1042 with 4xAA and it's absolutely butter. I'm sure another 512 stick of RAM would help minimize those stutters...
 
Wow, I witnessed maybe three studders through out my entire game. It's ran beautifully.
 
Mine was exactly like that and my system is similar to his

fx5900-omega drivers
512 mb 3200 ram
integrated audio
p4 2.4 g

But mine really lessened after the plaza to about something every 15-45 seconds ( I did not count this is a guess)
 
youre probably making it worse by running your cpu and ram out of sync.
 
For those who have finished the game:

"Wah-watch out for those hea hea hea hea head hump humpers gordon!"

:LOL:
 
mine does just about the same thing. But mine is more rapid like and it does this on all my high end games (HL2, CSS, doom 3, VBL)
it does it on CS 1.6 now to for only 1 minute though. :(
 
Ouch. I've had stutters once but not that bad. The reason why is I was running Norton in the background and that thing sucks up a ton of ram

Pentium 2.4 ghz OC'ed to 2.8 ghz
1 gig ram pci3200 crucial
120 gig ide 7.5k rpm
80 gig ide 7.5k rpm
Radeon 9800 pro 128 mb ram

Most people would consider that low end but I run everything on HL2 max settings with 6x AA and it runs smooth at 60 fps constant.
 
Same for me.. it's a little better now that I turned off harddrive caching but still not good.
 
We are working on a fix for this. Your movie is very helpful.

Thanks,
Gary McTaggart (Valve)
 
Wow, this video replicates the problems I've been having. Stuttering sound and general unplayability. Glad Valve are aware of it, maybe I'll keep my copy for a bit a see how it pans out!. :|

Abit BH7 (Intel 845PE)
Intel 2.5 ghz P4 533 FSB
512mb 2700 DDR
256mb 3200 DDR
Leadtek Winfast 400 TDH 6800 NU
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2
120gb Hitachi SATA 150 HDD
30gb IBM Deskstar 7200 HDD
Plextor CD-RW 40r-40w-12rw
Pioneer CD 40x
Pioneer 16x DVD
Enermax 420 Watt Noisetaker AX
+3.3V@32A, +5V@36A, +12V1@15A, +12V2@14A,
[email protected], [email protected]
19" Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 900u
Logitech Webcam Messenger
Windows XP SP2
 
My Specs are Lower then the OG Poster except I have more ram. I think that might be the key Because I'm running at 1280 res and only had very few if any smal studders during the game. I left all settings how the game recomended(with the little*) which all say High. I have the 9600xt Radeon. The only other thing I can think of besides ram is that you should probably not be running the omega drivers. I belive they are specificly for the x800 cards, but I could be wrong. Hope you get it sorted out.
 
GaryMcT said:
We are working on a fix for this. Your movie is very helpful.

Thanks,
Gary McTaggart (Valve)
Click to expand...


Good to hear. But keep in mind alot of people are getting even worse stutters than that movie to the point where the screen freezes and the sound loops for 2-3+ seconds at a time.
 
ive got the same problem, specs below;

2700+
1024 MB pc 2700
Sapphire Radeon ultimate edition 9800 pro 128MB
soundblaster digital
2 x 80 gig samsung spinpoints in raid 0
asus a7n8xd pcb 1.4
 
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