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Geek Culture / Half Life 2 Stuttering

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Hamish McHaggis
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 04:56
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I bought half life 2 today, according to the back of the pack, my computer is more than up to scratch for running it. Then I install it, and find out that it has a horrible problem with the graphics and sound stuttering whenever viewing a high detail area of the level, which make it very hard to enjoy the game. The thing is that I also have this problem with DBPro, whenever a high detail (texture) object for the first time, the graphics stutter, in exactly the same way as in HL2.

From a quick google I can see that this problem seems to be affecting a pretty big majority of players, and that the latest patch and advice from valve hasn't done much for a lot of them (as is the case with me). I worked out a pretty long time ago that it was something to do with the textures loading into memory, which is what the problem seems to be. Has anyone else here come across this problem in DBPro or HL2? And if so, has anyone found a way of fixing it, it's just damn annoying, and I really don't want to attempt to play HL2 until it's fixed (which I hope is soon), which is a shame, cos it's an excellent game .

Cheers

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David T
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 04:59
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This may seem obvious, but can you post your specs?

Also, have you got hte latest drivers?

My geforce 4 4800 seems to cope with it pretty well - haven't noticed any slowdown.

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Hamish McHaggis
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 05:13
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Sorry . I keep forgetting I took them out of my sig (damn character limit).

AMD Athelon 1600+ (~1.4ghz)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
256mb ram

Yep, I have the latest ATI drivers (well, recent enough), and I just downloaded a new processor driver, which made f all difference. Here is a pretty comprehensive summary of the problem, I am just asking here since I am also experiencing the problem with DBPro.

http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/

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Dot Merix
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 05:32
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Besides your video card, your pretty much running the game at minimum specifications...

2.4Ghz processor, 512Mb of RAM and a DirectX 9 card are the recommended, and i bet upgrading your ram would improve it's playability quite a bit. The thing with video cards, is they have a bond with ram. More ram, the better your video card will perform to it's optimum ability.



WindowsXP Home(Service pack 2), Athlon XP 2400+(2.1Ghz), 1GIG Ram, Ati Radeon 9800Pro 128MB.
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spooky
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 05:33
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Have you gone to the steam forum recently?

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/

There are LOADS of people having stuttering problems and it is the biggest bugbear with the game at present. They have tried to fix it with latest patch but apparently has made things worse for some people.

Personally I don't have a major problem. Only get a slight stutter at beginning of each level.

Boo!
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Teh Go0rfmeister
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 05:37
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i found that turning graphics down slightly not only helped stuttering but also the loadings times are really fast. i still have very slight stuttering problems, but its only when i do something that seems intense on the physics engine, like on the airboat shooting under a platform and it falling down behind me.

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Hamish McHaggis
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 05:52
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VanB - Yeah, I've been there. The reason I'm asking here is I have the exact same problem with DBPro, and it shouldn't be happening.

Quote: "i found that turning graphics down slightly not only helped stuttering but also the loadings times are really fast. i still have very slight stuttering problems, but its only when i do something that seems intense on the physics engine, like on the airboat shooting under a platform and it falling down behind me. "


I have turned the graphics all down to the lowest, and it doesn't change anything. And that's another thing. Are the loading times for sections of the levels generally meant to last around 5 minutes?

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Chenak
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 06:18
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extra ram makes a huge difference, i got 512mb ram and for me it takes about 30secs to 1min 30secs to load
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Hamish McHaggis
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 06:28
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Ok, so RAM seems to be the general concensus. I'll look into it. Anybody got any bargain RAM deals they can point me in the direction of ?

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lagmaster
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 06:39 Edited at: 6th Jan 2005 06:40
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depends on the speed of your ram. i picked up a 256 pc2100 for 21~ quid on ebuyer.com

i've been playing hl2 today and ive had no stuttering problems and i have 512mb ram radeon 9000, amd xp2000+

lagmaster - http://www.lagmaster.net was alive! http://www.dbforums.co.uk/ - was another db forum!

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Killswitch
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 06:50
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The only stuttering I get when playing HL2 is when a new level has loaded and I'm still holding down a movement key, it's gone as soon as I let go of the key.

~It's a common mistake to make, the rules of the English langauge do not apply to insanity~
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Shadow Robert
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 07:13
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It's down to your graphics ram and system ram.

Systems with 64/128MB Video Ram and 256MB System Ram, will experience problems unless you put the settings of the game to match your card.

Rendering at higher resolutions is a peice of piss, for some reason cards can handle that no trouble. Running them with higher quality textures and models though will cause it to lag and jutter.

This is down to not only are the textures not stored in DDS form allowing them to instantly load, but also the fact that the game textures are general 1024x1024 in size.
On my FX5200 system w/256MB Ram (before I added some stuff to it) it loaded levels bloody slowly and ran with a jumping effect, until I turned the texture and model levels so far down they resembled Doom3 pixelation without the fantastic Dynamic Shadows.

I currently play games on a:
AMD AthlonXP 2600+
256MB PC2700 RAM
GeForce FX 5200 64MB AGP8x (3DMark 1,529)
Windows 2003 Server Enterprise
DirectX 9.0c
Forceware 67.02
Hitachi 160GB ATA/133

The system itself gets very respectable benchmarking speeds at 1088x612 .. Everything is set to default setting for it really. Apart from the train it runs alright.

It looks bloody aweful compared to what my 6800 Ultra is capable of. Even on the same damn system, hopefully when my new PSU gets here I'll be able to use it again. Fact is that Half-Life 2 relies very heavily on high-resolution textures to look good, and that is something that alot of budget cards are just not equipped to handle, either down to memory reasons or down to fill-rate reasons.


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Rob K
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 07:21
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512MB RAM is effectively a requirement for playing the most recent games.


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PiratSS
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Posted: 6th Jan 2005 08:26
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There are few patches out there, they make the screen 320x240 with 8bit depth. They also hide all the lighting, turn of all sound/music effects, remove any shaders, remove the body after death,hide weapon off the screen, and halve the rendering depth. After you got that patch, you can also get a 64x64x8bit texture pack to lower the quality of the textrues and improve the loading times.
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Teh Go0rfmeister
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Posted: 7th Jan 2005 00:53
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now thats a patch... but... hold on a sec:

Quote: " I have the exact same problem with DBPro, "


HL2 was made in DBPro!!!



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David T
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Posted: 7th Jan 2005 01:22
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Quote: "Only get a slight stutter at beginning of each level."


and

Quote: "The only stuttering I get when playing HL2 is when a new level has loaded and I'm still holding down a movement key, it's gone as soon as I let go of the key."


It's the autosave

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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 7th Jan 2005 02:46
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Quote: "HL2 was made in DBPro!!!"

No, that was Halo 2...

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Cian Rice
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Posted: 7th Jan 2005 03:05
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Actually it was both. It's in small print in the Half-Life 2 Demo and in the ending credits of Halo 2. Someone told me that UT04 was also made in DBP, and PayneKiller was actuall made in DBC.

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spooky
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Posted: 7th Jan 2005 03:05
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I'm surprised that the film 'A bugs life' wasnt made in DBPro - it's got enough of 'em.

Boo!
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Teh Go0rfmeister
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Posted: 7th Jan 2005 07:22
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rofl spooky.

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Shadow Robert
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Posted: 7th Jan 2005 10:06
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lmao.. well they did try, but then they found a bigger one appear when they tried to load that many instances of the same model


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Dot Merix
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Posted: 8th Jan 2005 15:26
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Quote: "512MB RAM is effectively a requirement for playing the most recent games"


Have you ever played Planetside? I couldnt play it quite right until i had 1 GIG of ram. Otherwise it'd get laggy during bigger fights and all of a sudden i'd be dead and respawning at a respawn point... Great game though.



WindowsXP Home(Service pack 2), Athlon XP 2400+(2.1Ghz), 1GIG Ram, Ati Radeon 9800Pro 128MB.
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Teh Go0rfmeister
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Posted: 9th Jan 2005 06:54
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if i was into proper commercial game dev, i'd make the games with a few sets of graphics, some of which that are far beyond what my pc can cope with, so in the mean time people are like "wow, this game runs fine on my pc" an then in the future people are like "wow this game doesn't look old at all" kinda thing... you get what i mean right?

Rome Total War has mentions of them doing this in the support site, saying how yes you will have problems with full graphics settings on high since it's designed to also look good on future pc's

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Hamish McHaggis
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 02:00
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Just ressurecting this thread to say that it worked . I have 512 ram now, and the game hardly jitters comparatively. Still jerks a bit sometimes, which I guess is what most people are experiencing. Cheers for the advice !

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Shadow Robert
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 02:06
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Heh, yeah. 512MB isn't really a requirement as such for current games, I mean under Windows ME I can run Unreal 2 fine on 256MB, but under XP it has speed and loading issues until I have 384MB.

So the OS does play a role in what is required to a degree. Half-Life2 is a hog for Ram though because it uses ALOT of high-resolution textures to make itself look good. They just eat ram like candy unfortunately
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Teh Go0rfmeister
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 02:15
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one can never have enough RAM

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Avan Madisen
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 07:33
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I recently bought Vampire the Maquerade: Bloodlines, which runs on the Source Engine (the same engine powering Half-Life 2) and on the box it says it wants 512mb of ram and 1.4gb of harddrive space for a "windows swap file". This 'technically' means you need 2gb of ram to run the game properly! Someone check the Half-Life 2 box a similar requirement!

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Hamish McHaggis
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 16:50
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Quote: "Heh, yeah. 512MB isn't really a requirement as such for current games, I mean under Windows ME I can run Unreal 2 fine on 256MB, but under XP it has speed and loading issues until I have 384MB."


Yeah, I tried to run the same DBP demo with the jittering on my win98, 400mhz, integrated graphics card, 96mb ram pc and there was no jittering (but quite a bit slower frame rate). Kind of stupid really.

In the end, the jittering problem should really be solved by valve, so that it doesn't jitter even if you only have 256 ram. So should TGC .

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2Leet 2Lose
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Posted: 17th Jan 2005 07:29
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Ive tried Half Life2 but the loading is very long....well what am i supposed 2 excpect from a 3GB game??? solder>

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