Stutter after reinstall

[Darkside55]

First off, yes, this is another thread about stutter, but it's a little different this time.

I recently had to reformat my computer (long story involving the devil that is SP2), did a clean reinstall of Windows XP Pro and reinstalled all my drivers. Reinstalled HL2, and after waiting for Steam to decrypt my files, I was going to play the game on hard this time around.

After I stepped off the train in Insertion Point, I noticed some extremely bad stutter. Insanely bad. It was most noticeable when I was standing near the turnstile, listening to Dr. Breen, and looking around in a circle. It's also very bad when I go around corners. Thing is, I have no idea why.

I'm running the game at 1280x1024, high everything with no AA and 2x AF. My specs are as follows:

P4 3.0Ghz
1024mb DDR400
Radeon 9800 Pro (tried using both 4.12s, my old drivers, and the new 5.1s)

And just incase anyone says, "You can expect stutter at those settings with those specs," no, I shouldn't. I played the whole game all the way through on these exact specifications before reinstall and I had no problems, not one whatsoever. I had minor slowdown in some of the bigger fights, but I stress the word minor, just as I'm now stressing the word stutter.

So, what are my options? I'm not sure whether this is the product of a botched XP install (even though it shouldn't be since I reformatted the drive and installed clean), or something else. I'm not sure if I should try reinstalling HL2, or reformatting yet again...my Windows has been acting funny, and other games and applications have been experiencing some problems.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[randomstain]

u reinstalling of the cds?
i wanna know how to reinstall the downloadable version u get from steam, without re-downloading hl2 all over again...

 

[Darkside55]

I don't think it's possible to do that. Anyway, you touched on another part of my problem.

The problem seems to have escalated. Before, when I reinstalled HL2 off the CD, everytime I opened Steam it would give me a "decrypting HL2 files" message. Every single time. Steam monitor would also show CS:S working in the background, using bandwidth even though the game was complete. After Steam decrypted the files, I could play HL2 (albeit with massive framerate stutter).

I tried one of my other games to see if maybe it was a hardware issue and not a game-specific issue. I installed Halo, popped it in, ran it at 1280x1024 with high settings, and aside from a slight choke in the intro sequence, it was perfectly fine. I played through the first level (which is graphics-intensive for my comp) just to be sure. I tried spinning around in a circle really fast since that's what seemed to choke HL2 so bad. No problems.

So I thought, "Maybe it had something to do with the install." Uninstalled HL2, left Steam on to DL the entire game again. Maybe if it downloaded it wouldn't have to decrypt the files repeatedly, and that might have been the problem.
I just woke up, tried to see if I still had the stutter by launching HL2...at which point, my computer crashed. It crashed as it was switching from the desktop to the fullscreen game, in the process of changing my screen size. It was showing the desktop at 1280x1024 when it crashed (my desktop's at 1024x768). This is the exact same problem I had while trying to play the Republic Commando demo; I could not even get into the game because my computer would crash once I went fullscreen.

So I restarted, tried again. I wanted to see at exactly what point my computer would crash. When I started HL2 I kept hitting Caps Lock to see if my computer was responsive. After doing that for awhile, and trying tab+alt (which sort-of worked), the intro started. I got all the way to the menu loading screen when the game became unresponsive. Not my computer, just the game. After ten minutes of just leaving it there it went from the blurred menu image to blackscreen, then died.

I've now gone from being able to play a stuttery game to not being able to play the game at all, not to mention other games that might have this problem. I could really use some help now, guys. Any techies out there want to offer me some suggestions?

This is really beginning to piss me off and I'm this close to reformatting yet again to see if that'll fix my problems. Like I said, any help is appreciated.

Ninja Edit: May or may not be relevant, but after my HL2 crashed I noticed my Steam monitor was running...trying to update HL2, even though the game has been complete for many hours now. It wasn't running before the crash, only after.

Edit #2: Attempted to play again after Steam monitor finished. Allowed me to play, but still stuttering.

 

[Darkside55]

Bumping this because I found a solution. If any of you are having a framerate stutter problem, this might help you.

Reinstall HL2. After finishing the install, do not play HL2 first! Instead, decrypt HL:Source and play that first. Set the game up to whatever settings you want to play HL2 at (in my case, 1280x1024 @ high textures), and play through some HL like that. Do the hazard course, watch the endgame, make a quick save somewhere, whatever.

Quit HL:S. Load up HL2. Your video settings will be exactly the same as in HL:S. Play HL2. If you're lucky, your stutter will be gone. I used to have a massive stutter after getting off the train in Point Insertion, whilst Dr. Breen was talking. Even moving caused my framerates to stutter. Playing HL:S first fixed it.

Note that this won't get rid of ALL your stutter. I still had slight stuttering when entering new areas, rounding certain corners, and when Lamarr jumped out at Barney (it was real bad then). I fixed those by setting my AGP speed to 8x. That got rid of almost all the stuttering, except for a little bit of framerate stutter at odd times.

You may also want to defrag after installing and playing HL2. I have heard that this helps, but I have not tried it yet.

Also, Windows XP Service Pack 2 might play a part in making HL2 stop stuttering. I'm not really sure on that, but it was one of the things I did before reinstalling HL2 again. It's a variable. Whether it has anything to do with fixing the stutter or not, I'll never know.

Hope this helps some people!