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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."

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

    Will make the loading times even longer? Great!

  3. 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 :-/

  4. They planned this all along by 2bluemike · · Score: 5, Funny

    STEAM: Still Time Enough After its on the Market

  5. 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.

  6. 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.
  7. St-st-stutt-tt-ttering? by bryhhh · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  8. 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!