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Half- Life 2 Stutter Solved

Posted by Zonk on from the texture-loads-lead-to-grumpy-gamers dept.

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."

24 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hope someone will make a torrent for it, for all the people that don't have a legal copy.

  2. hmm? by Sv-Manowar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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."

    Surely this would have been noted during Beta testing, unless they were testing on all high end machines ?

    --
    Business Voyeur
    1. Re:hmm? by jpmoney · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm not sure what these "high end" machines were. I have the problem (intermittantly and only for a few seconds, but it does happen) on my Athlon 64 3200+, 1G PC3200, Nvidia 6800, etc. I know its not the "latest" with PCI express, etc out, but I'd still call it "high end".

      I guess if I had a 4.0ghz overclocked, watercooled system with a 512 meg 6800 Ultra PCI express (do they even exist yet?) I'd be smooth, but for now I'm mostly smooth.

      You think it'll work? It'll take a miracle (or longer load-times upfront).

      That is the root question though - how did this bug get through QA? Its fairly annoying and beyond that takes away from the "immersion" you have during gameplay.

      --
      unf.
    2. Re:hmm? by vhold · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If its only intermittent and only for a few seconds, you might have the auto-save stutter. The game has auto save points sprinkled about rather liberally that are the only cause of quite a few peoples' stutter. I don't know what part of suddenly writting out 8 megs to disk in the middle of gameplay seemed like a good idea at the time, with no way of turning it off.

      I'm worried that even after this fix, that problem might still remain.

  3. Hmmm.... by comwiz56 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder what else this patch will include. Maybe some anti-piracy stuff. Valve has to working on cracking down on that more. Anything else that needs patching?

  4. So the fix... by llevity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Will make the loading times even longer? Great!

    1. Re:So the fix... by SuperRob · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't know entirely why this was modded as funny, but I suppose it's because there is no way to mod a post as "Bingo!". I'd bet this will do nothing but make the already atrocious loading times even more ... atrocious.

  5. This hurts the computer industry by 2bluemike · · Score: 5, Funny

    I would have preferred to have them say "Oh, the only way to fix it is by upgrading to 64-bit AMD, 3GB RAM, etc. etc." My stock would have gone up :-/

  6. Great (sarcasm) by NeMon'ess · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now the level load times will be longer. More important, someone explain why there's any video memory to spare? I'm presuming the main point was to free up space and swap textures out when entering a new area that didn't need those anymore. If all level textures are loaded at once, some aren't going to fit, right?

    1. Re:Great (sarcasm) by vhold · · Score: 2

      Well, we're talking about system memory here, not video. Maybe it turns out that Windows virtual memory paging is faster, or more importantly, more interrupt/interactivity friendly, then HL2's implementation of the same basic concept?

    2. Re:Great (sarcasm) by cookd · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:Great (sarcasm) by NeMon'ess · · Score: 2

      Hadn't thought of that. Thanks for the theory.

    4. Re:Great (sarcasm) by ZosX · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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).

      By hitting the pagefile, the resulting memory space is swapped. It would take it a very long time for it to be passed from the hard drive back into RAM. Probably it would occur somewhere around 33-66 MB/sec. Compared to the hundreds of megabytes per second that DDR memory can pump out. A hard drive is a whole lot slower than just having that data cached in RAM. The last thing you would want to do is swap it out, and it would be more likely that the operating system's components would be swapped out before an actively running task's would. Ever let windows sit idle when running apps that eat up most of your physical ram? When you close that application and let the system swap back in, it can take a few good minutes for the system to be responsive again. While the preemptive tasking in Windows leaves a lot to be desired for (IMHO), it still tries to balance I/O with user interactivity, however I have seen W2K choke with just a 10% cpu kernel load, while heavy paging is happening. If you are pulling information off of the drive (happens a whole lot in 3D games), you would certainly not want the drive to accessing paged memory at the same time. Sound starts stuttering because it is not being cached fast enough, etc.

      Sorry just a ramble. Swapping is and likely will always be a very large performance hit.

      --
      zosxavius photography
  7. They planned this all along by 2bluemike · · Score: 5, Funny

    STEAM: Still Time Enough After its on the Market

  8. Optimization gone awry? by seanellis · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Rules of Optimization:
    • Rule 1: Don't do it.
    • Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.
    • - M.A. Jackson

    Aggressive memory management of textures is an optimisation. If you don't absolutely need to do it, you shouldn't do it. And it seems from the nature of the patch that you don't absolutely need to do it.

    Obviously, I'm not being 100% fair - perhaps it needed to be done and then the texture load went down because the assets were redesigned.

    --
    Sean Ellis
    Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
    1. Re:Optimization gone awry? by Senjutsu · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Optimization gone awry? by cgenman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      By loading all textures on level load, they remove the attempted optimization, and solve the problem.

      And probably introduced the problem of much slower loading times. This screams of "stopgap" to me, and I wouldn't be surprised to see dynamic loading reintroduced at a future date without the associated, relatively minor problem.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
    3. Re:Optimization gone awry? by Dmala · · Score: 2, Funny

      I have to object to your rule. As a QA Engineer, hasty, ill-conceived optimizations provide me with job security.

  9. St-st-stutt-tt-ttering? by bryhhh · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wh-wh-wh-what st-st-st-st-stutt-tt-tt-ering?

  10. Re:Great. by Trikenstein · · Score: 2, Funny
    (No matter, I'll be playing parts of it over again anyway...)

    I remember keeping a save of the original H-L for months.
    It was right before the ninja/assissins.
    I'd load up the game, go into god mode and crowbar the frak out of them.
    Great stress relief after a bad day.

  11. Torrent: It's not just for pirates anymore by superultra · · Score: 4, Funny

    If the patch is distributed by Steam, legit users will need the torrent as well!

  12. Revolutionary Slow Motion Feature by vhold · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This will really date me, but on the box for Conan for the Commodore 64, it advertised:

    "Revolutionary Slow Motion Feature when the action gets really intense."

    It was basically the same flickering slow motion many c64 games got when the hardware wasn't up to the task.

  13. I had the stutter somethin' fierce... by Brakz0rz · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  14. Response Time by aliens · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I just want to note that this game has a great team behind it to be so quick with a fix. I mean nothing coming out the door is perfect. Unless you've ever developed anything more complicated than "Hello World" you know this. Doom 3 I think was extremely polished, but HL2 is an example of a developer wanting to make sure everyone gets a great playing experience.

    --
    -- taking over the world, we are.