[grecco_julio]

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

12/15/04 11:11:47 PM GMT
In DougV's post from yesterday he claims, "There are currently less than 200 open tickets in our support incident database for the audio stuttering problem". Apparently my personal correspondence with a Valve engineer confirming the problem, and the hundreds of thousands of forum posts on this topic are not enough to convince Valve that this problem is widespread. This site has been on the front pages of Slashdot, Blue's News, Voodoo Extreme, GameSpot and numerous other enthusiast sites and has received over 600,000 views.

To show Valve the extent of this problem, we need to play by their rules. Anyone experiencing the stuttering or slowdown problem should submit a ticket in Valve's support database by using the following link:

Tell Valve About Your Stuttering Problem Here: http://steampowered.custhelp.com/cgi...nduser/ask.php


___________________

Here is what I reported them:

My Half Life 2 has sound stuttering, graphic hiccups, and frame slowdowns problems. The latest patch made it worse. I bought the game, expecting it to be free of bugs (is it asking to much?) and me and my friends are pissed off by those annoying bugs, we don't enjoy playing Half Life 2 with them (I tried everything from FanSite and official Steam Powered forums to get rid of it, or, at least slow the problem a little, but no hint I've tried until now worked).

[Sxotty]

I cannot believe they think only few people had this issue.

Anyway I reported mine, make them work a bit :P

[grecco_julio]

http://www.hlfallout.net/forums/inde...25988&st=0

[Blade]

This subject is so last month!

[LocutusX]

Last month? Not really.

Especially considering how today's patch actually makes the problem worse than it's ever been.

[jjayb]

I think the only reason less than 200 reported it is because they said they were aware of the problem and were working on it. I never sent in a ticket. Why should I have? They were supposedly fixing it. After reading that I went ahead and sent in a support ticket. Makes me wonder how many people like me who are out there that never bothered to send in a ticket.

[Guden Oden]

I'm one of those. I still can't be arsed to do it, why should I?

HL2 and Steam are stinking piles of CRAP as far as I'm concerned now. I'm sitting here looking at steam hogging 100% CPU and almost FIFTY megabytes of memory!

For doing WHAT?!!?!?!11oneone!? All it's doing is updating CS:Source, a game I never played in my life, what the FUCK does it need to use 100% CPU for just to download some stuff? In fact, every time steam uses the net connection it racks up the CPU to max.

Now it finished updating the game, it's STILL using nearly fifty megs of memory!!!

[rms]

Well, I've been playing HL2 for some time, and here is my collection of tips that I strongly suggest you try:

In your bios, set the AGP Aperture to the size of the ram on the videocard. For my 6800GT, it's 256meg.

In your bios, turn off Fast Writes.

In HL2, set Audioquality at Medium (I have everything else set at the highest settings)

In the videocard drivers, disable FSAA and AA, and instead run at the highest resolution that gives smooth framerate. I run at 1600x1200 and get 65-75fps in timedemos.

In the ....\hl2\SAVE directory, set the file properties of all 4 autosave*.* files +R. This will eliminate autosaves and the stutters associated with them. Use your quicksave F6/F9 buttons for saving instead.

In the Launch Options for HL2 (in the steam menu) put the following:
-heapsize 400000 +map_background none
Vary the heapsize value for the amount of ram you have, I have 512meg. The effect of these is to make the initial game loadtime much faster.

Make a blank file valve.avi with notepad, and put it in the ...\hl2\media directory replacing the file there, and be sure to make it +R. This eliminates that intro video.

(mentioned in a steamforum post) After you start HL2 and are at the menu, ctrl-alt-del and in TaskManager rightclick on hl2.exe and set it's priority at Low. This has helped many people with stuttering. Try all the things above first, but this might help you too.

I made a ...\hl2\cfg\autoexec.cfg file and put the following items into it:

snd_mixahead "0.4"
sv_forcepreload "1"
cl_allowupload "1"
cl_allowdownload "1"
cl_forcepreload "1"
mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware "1"

These were commonly mentioned when the stuttering problem first appeared, which ones actually have an effect is a good question but they don't hurt anyway. Notice that although Valve sets the mat_ cvar to 0 by default for Nvidia cards, I have it at 1 for my 6800GT.

rms

[LocutusX]

ALERT!

Steam has just pushed out an update for HL2

the one and only fix listed: "fixed sound stuttering problems".

OMG WTF OHNOES...

people, please check in once you've tried HL2 after the update and let us know if it's still stuttering or not

[sonix666]

Even though I played out the game already, I have submitted a question about the audio stuttering to help out the people that have even bigger problems with audio stuttering. Lets all do that.

[LocutusX]

my stuttering (which only ever happened in the "AntiCitizen One" & follow reeman chapters) was reduced by about 50% with this new patch, running HL2 at "default" settings (all my previous tweaks discarded).

i upgraded the same day from Realtek AC97 to SB Audigy 2 ZS and in addition to a very noticeable improvement in aural quality and surround sound placements the stuttering was reduced even further... i'm quite happy now.