HL2 - sound stutter problem officially recognized

[Jeff]

Valve has officially recognized the stuttering problem in HL2 and is currently working to fix it.

Here's a page dedicated to the problem, with lots of info, and potential workarounds till it's fixed.

[Calvin]

I was JUST about to ask what was causing my game to stutter! I finally got to play last night-and love it-but it was stuttering all the time but the FPS was good, so i had no clue what was up!

Good man Jeff, let me look at that page.

[PaulBot]

I am very pleased to see them officially acknowledge this problem and jump on fixing it.

Score another point for Valve!!

[tiny ogre]

Latest update to that page says they found the problem and a fix is coming (no ETA).   It's pretty bad on my machine even with stuff turned way down, I've been waiting for a fix before I play much farther.  It's a shame, it does run very smoothly in between this problem even on high settings, but this hits me frequently enough to be very annoying.

[Jeff]

Latest update to that page says they found the problem and a fix is coming (no ETA).  

Thanks for the update, and glad to hear they've located the problem. I hope a fix will come soon. It gets annoying for me, too, but not enough to quit playing

[-Lord Ebonstone-]

Wow.  I've already finished the damn game, bug and all.  I didn't care!

[tiny ogre]

Actually I tried playing some more again now and it's running great, not seeing any stuttering.  At first I thought it was because I turned the textures down to low, but then I turned them back up to high and it's still running fine.  Shrug!

Having a blast too.

[olaf]

I found this problem to be goddamn annoying, so much so that I decided to shelve the game until it is fixed.  I shouldnt be surprised, but I cant believe they missed this in QA.

olaf

[Jeff]

Great news:

Valve's Erik Johnson updated the stutter site with this information:

    "We've found a fix for this problem, and we're planning on shipping it no later than tomorrow".



btw, the problem turned out to be a caching of textures during gameplay. I believe the fix will be to force textures to load during level load. Could mean longer load times, but less overall frustration.

[Gryndyl]

Well,  finished the game with stutter-if the patch tommorow cleans the stutter up then I'm just going to have to replay the entire game fom start to enjoy the new sound  

Oh, woe is me!    I know what I'm doing with my Thanksgiving gaming time

[Calvin]

Well,  finished the game with stutter-if the patch tommorow cleans the stutter up then I'm just going to have to replay the entire game fom start to enjoy the new sound  

Oh, woe is me!    I know what I'm doing with my Thanksgiving gaming time

I have to finish this somehow before WoW comes out!! I love this game so mujch, but I have the guild in WoW and all that stuff..ARGHGHG NOT ENOUGH GAMING  TIME@@

[Gryndyl]

Well,  finished the game with stutter-if the patch tommorow cleans the stutter up then I'm just going to have to replay the entire game fom start to enjoy the new sound  

Oh, woe is me!    I know what I'm doing with my Thanksgiving gaming time

I have to finish this somehow before WoW comes out!! I love this game so mujch, but I have the guild in WoW and all that stuff..ARGHGHG NOT ENOUGH GAMING  TIME@@

Ah, yes, I'll probably be playing WoW with my thanksgiving gaming time. will have to take HL2 breaks.

[Thin_J]

I'm glad they're fixing it so quickly. Makes me want to run through the game a third time.

All this crap with WoW makes me glad I hate RPG's, and MMORPG's most of all.

Actually, I can't think of a game-style I appreciate less. I'd rather be playing virtual checkers or some crap like that.

[bluefugue]

Latest update to that page says they found the problem and a fix is coming (no ETA).   It's pretty bad on my machine even with stuff turned way down, I've been waiting for a fix before I play much farther.  It's a shame, it does run very smoothly in between this problem even on high settings, but this hits me frequently enough to be very annoying.

Same deal with me.  I played through anyway, but a second run-through will wait for a fix if it is coming anytime soon.

edit: Tomorrow!  Coolio.

[Jancelot]

With the fixes the stutter was much better but still noticable.  After the fix is in place I'll just crank up the difficulty and play through again, too.

[MonkeyFinger]

Once they get it straightened out for HL2, I wonder how long before it finds its way over to VTM:Bloodlines?  Same problem there. :?

[FlyingElvis]

I just don't understand why they don't catch these issues in QA. Its not like HL2 was shoved out the door early.

I need smooth framerates or I get motion sickness from FPS. The stutter in this game means I have to play in short session or I get nauseous.

[Jeff]

I just don't understand why they don't catch these issues in QA. Its not like HL2 was shoved out the door early.

I know, that is weird. In a poll on that page I linked to, more than half of the respondents had this problem to a significant degree. And it happens on every possible hardware configuration. How QA didn't notice it is beyond me.

Fix should come today, fingers crossed.

[ChrisGwinn]

The people it doesn't happen to aren't looking for solutions on message boards - they're playing the game.  There's a pretty darn big sampling error here.  I have a minor case of the bug, and if that's all they had seen then it certainly looks like acceptable performance degradation on certain kinds of systems.

And there are so many possible configurations of hardware and software - you just can't expect to get all of them.  I knew three people who ran into a game-stopping problem when running Morrowind on a Windows 2000 server with a Nvidia card while the terminal services service was started.  I can't imagine that particular configuration is running in very many test labs.

[olaf]

Sorry but there is zero excuse for not catching this before the game went retail.  Its happening to WAY too many people.

One of two things happened.  Their QA sucks ass.  Judging by the rest of the game, I dont think this is the case.  So that leaves: Their change control sucks ass.  Something must have changed late in the development cycle that wasnt documented and so was not tested properly.

olaf

[Creepy_Smell]

I've been able to play HL2 ok with the stutter. It mainly seemed to happen the first time I shot something at the start of a game but decreased as I played.

It mainly drives my batty in CS:S since during my first 5 minutes or so of play I die almost everytime time in combat since I stutter for a few seconds. I noticed that it goes away as I play too so I didnt stop playing completely. It just makes those first few minutes a pain. But once they fix it I cant blame stutter for my suckiness  

[Jancelot]

People who think developing software for the endless permutations of PC configurations is easy are being very short-sighted.  It's unfortunate and annoying that a problem like this made it through, but I'm not surprised one bit.  If we had a uniform hardware platform (i.e. a console or an Apple) then my tolerance goes down pretty much to 0.  Hardware conflicts are a part of life for PC owners, but I'm waiting to see how fast they move to fix it.  They said that it should be out by today.  So far I still have some stuttering.

[Jeff]

They said that it should be out by today.  So far I still have some stuttering.

Same here, still stuttering. No fix yet.

[Gryndyl]

The ETA for the fix didn't come from any kind of official announcement. Unofficially, they're still testing a few things on the fix before pushing it out. I'd rather have a working patch than a rushed patch and the fact that we're even already expecting it is a good sign in my book on how supported the game is.

[Jeff]

I think the patch is in. I just started HL2, and it pulled down an update.

Off to test for stutter

[Jeff]

I think the patch is in. I just started HL2, and it pulled down an update.

Off to test for stutter

edit: it appears to be fixed

[warning]

I think the patch is in. I just started HL2, and it pulled down an update.

Off to test for stutter

It is!  

The changes in this release are directed at reducing the problem some users are experiencing with sound stuttering. The sound stuttering is not indicative of a sound problem, sound stuttering is only a symptom of texture thrashing on your video card or AGP memory. For information on how to reduce texture thrashing visit this link on our support site:

http://steampowered.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=280

This update will fix sound stuttering that users were experiencing that would last for longer than a few seconds during normal gameplay. This update will also eliminate this same behavior following a quicksave or autosave. There will still be a short pause while the autosave happens, but not the more drawn out stuttering behavior.

We are still investigating another performance problem on some hardware, which will manifest where the game is getting into a state where performance drops to less than 5 fps and does not recover or crashes.

Hope that takes care of it.  Now what follows is very interesting...

Next week we will be releasing the Source SDK, along with a surprise for the community.

Day of Defeat?  The official Alyx Nude Patch?  Who knows?

[none]

vanilla h-l 2 dm and map(s).  gotta be.

[bluefugue]

I'm still getting some minor stutter... doesn't seem to be much different than before, maybe a little better.  No really long drawn out episodes at least.  I need to make the manual adjustment they mentioned though, I guess the patch alone may not cut it.  Also I don't know if they got to the Nvidia fix yet?  Does this patch just apply to ATI cards or to all cards?

[Kagath]

Forget that! I want a little TFC:S lovin'! Or at least an update on TF2...

[Daehawk]

They are gonna start selling Gordon Freeman brand crowbars. You can pick them up at ACE hardware for the standard price  

[Thin_J]

Post update I still get in-game stutters every so often. Again, it's never really affected the gameplay, and always seems to happen while I'm just walking around.

Really really weird.

*Edit*
nevermind! Restarting Steam brought on yet another update of some kind, and the stuttering seems to be gone completely. It even seems to have stopped doing the initial stutter after all the loading times. It did still do it once or twice, but the majority of the loading points were stutter free as well.

Excellent.

[Jeff]

Cool. My stutters are completely gone too.  

[MonkeyFinger]

Mine are (mostly) gone as well.  :wink: Still an occasional minor snag but nothing like the major stuttering that was going on before.

[bluefugue]

I can't even tell at this point.  There's still some stuttering.  As bad as before?  Hard to say... I don't think so, but it still comes and goes.

What is the deal with AGP bandwith or whatever, what setting are you supposed to change in BIOS to eliminate "texture thrashing"?  Anyone know?

Otherwise -- whatever.  I'm not gonna agonize about this too much, already won the game anyway.

[whiteboyskim]

Next week we will be releasing the Source SDK, along with a surprise for the community.

Day of Defeat?  The official Alyx Nude Patch?  Who knows?

How about the original Half-Life in Source for free, since paying for that again is stupid?

[leo8877]

I never had this problem until they released a fix for it.

[LucidSmoke]

I never had the sound stutter either until just a few days ago.....I am back in the City and all of a sudden the sound is a problem.  Does Steam automatically load the patches without any input from the user?  If it does, then I am fairly confident that that is what is causing my sudden stuttering.  I was playing flawlessly up unit the time of the patch.  I will try the console command to disable the correction and see if it makes any difference.  It was driving me nuts trying to figure out why the sudden change.  I did a spyware check, virus check, tweaked my AGP Aperture settings in Bios, tweaked my graphic card settings, etc.  All to no avail.  I will let you know what happens with the console command.

[LucidSmoke]

Yep, it was the patch that was causing the problems.  Typed in "mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0".  Played to the end of the game with NO stuttering problems.  Hope this helps people.

[bluefugue]

Typed in where?  Console?  Config file?