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Half- Life 2 Stutter Solved
As a followup to the story on Saturday about the HL2 stutter bug, Voodoo Extreme has news that a patch is on the way, with an ETA of tomorrow. "A patch will be coming for this issue that will load all of the required textures into video memory on level load, rather than doing it during game play."
Textures can be in one of 3 "places":
1. In the HalfLife level files, compressed and raw.
2. In system memory, properly formatted for direct transfer to the video card.
3. In video card memory.
Going from stage 1 to stage 2 takes some CPU power as well as disk access. Going from 2 to 3 is probably a lot easier on the system, even if the system memory has been paged out (just page back in, no significant CPU cycles used, just a bit of latency).
If properly done, you can do some of the stage-1 to stage-2 work while the game is playing, but it is a real balancing act between keeping frame rates up during play and keeping load times down between levels. If the balance is off just a bit, the work isn't done by the time the texture is needed, and the game stuttttters.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
His point was that since the "on demand" texturing loading was causing the stuttering, it was Yet Another Example that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Trying to be clever about optimizing texture memory usage only ended up hurting performance.
By loading all textures on level load, they remove the attempted optimization, and solve the problem.
On my P4 1.8 512mb
gf3.200ti w/128mb vid ram (obviously nothing fancy...)
I added 256mb of system ram and there was no more stutter. Kind of surprised me actually. Even quick and auto saves are no worries anymore.
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot