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Half Life 2 Stuttering Bug Official

Posted by michael on from the you're-all-beta-testers dept.

sinner0423 writes "Due to recent complaints on several forums, Steampowered announced they are working on a fix to this stuttering problem in Half Life 2. Usually, a game bug isn't news-worthy, but the sporadic nature of this bug makes me wonder - who else has problems with HL2 pausing/skipping? This site outlines the problem certain users are having in a very clear & concise manner, and also includes some stopgap solutions from Erik Johnson & other Valve employees."

2 of 456 comments (clear)

  1. I had this problem too and here's how to fix it by illumin8 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I had this problem too when I first installed HalfLife 2 and it was frustrating as hell... Just a little background on my system:

    Intel 875 chipset (800 mhz. FSB)
    P4 2.6C (hyperthreaded)
    1GB PC3200 memory (dual channel, 800 mhz.)
    ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB graphics
    Windows XP Pro SP2

    In other words, this is not a bottom of the line system, and runs Doom 3 perfectly...

    Now, when I first installed the game, I installed it to my D: drive, which happened to be an older 30GB drive that came from my previous computer. I just stuck it in there as a slave drive for extra storage space, having filled up the 120GB primary IDE hard drive a while ago...

    Anyway, I noticed the stuttering always seemed to happen when the system was accessing data from the hard drive.

    I finally went into the Device Mangler (haha... that's what I call it anyways, you might know it as the Device Manager), and checked the DMA settings on my secondary hard drive... Sure enough, it was only using PIO Mode!!! I always wondered why that second hard drive was slow. I tried to enable DMA mode, but was out of DMA channels, so I couldn't.

    Anyway, I freed up some space on my hard drive and moved it to the primary hard drive... voila, problem solved! Now the game plays smoothly and the immersion experience is what it should be...

    This problem seems to be linked to either inadequate DMA support for your hard drive (which can spike the CPU during disk access and loading times), or a hard drive that just isn't fast enough to keep up. Also, because all of the sound in the game is MP3 files that are streamed off of the hard drive, hard drive bandwidth seems to be very important for this game, in addition, I'm sure all of the MP3 decompression makes you take a big CPU hit, especially when they're mixing multiple channels of MP3 audio together at once and outputting it to 5.1 surround.

    This is just a theory of mine, but it worked for me... Put the game on your fastest hard drive, and defragment it... Make sure DMA is enabled for that hard drive, and you should (hopefully) be set.

    --
    "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
  2. Re:Hmmm.... by neko9 · · Score: 5, Informative

    from This site - Vampire: The Masquerade, which is based on Half-Life 2's Source engine is also reported to have the same stuttering issues.

    looks like engine problem.