Developer acknowledges frame-rate problems experienced by many players of the shooter, says a fix is on the way.
Since its release last week, Half-Life 2 has been scooped up many-a-PC gamer. However, many of those same gamers have encountered recurring problem with the long-awaited shooter. As conveniently summed up on blep.net, many Half-Life 2 players have "characterized by a sudden massive drop in frame rate when turning corners or moving into new areas of the game." Said frame-rate drop is "usually accompanied by looping or stuttering sound."
News source: GameSpot
Since its release last week, Half-Life 2 has been scooped up many-a-PC gamer. However, many of those same gamers have encountered recurring problem with the long-awaited shooter. As conveniently summed up on blep.net, many Half-Life 2 players have "characterized by a sudden massive drop in frame rate when turning corners or moving into new areas of the game." Said frame-rate drop is "usually accompanied by looping or stuttering sound."
News source: GameSpot
What's New:
- Fixed problem with local cd database which set to 0 empty year field
- Added few missing language labels
- Changed FreeRIP logo and icon (designed by AWIcons http://www.awicons.com)
- Added Czech language file
- Added Turkish language file
- Added Dutch language file
- Added Swedish language file
- Added Portugues (Brazil) language file
- Added Spanish language file
- Lesser windows adjustment for better fitting translations
- Added option to create playlist (M3U/PLS/B4S/HTML/CSV) on CD ripping
- Now FreeRIP uses Ogg 1.1.2 and Vorbis 1.1.0 libraries
- Fixed a problem in configuration loaded which could cause 0-volume ripped files
- Added a sample line in advanced filename definition of the Output Path option tab
- Now FreeRIP can handle duplicated filenames during ripping adding an auto incrementing number
- Fixed a GPF problem that sometimes happens at the end of track while ripping CD to MP3
- Fixed various problems in MP3 file reader
- Fixed a problem that could cause ripping/converting progress bar run inconsistently
- Added Comedy-Planet software bundled in installation package (OPT-IN install)
http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/#041127103530
most of the problems had to do with texture caching if recall correctly.
if only they'd promise an online content delivery and authentication system that would screw everyone over royally, especially in the long run.... at least they would've met that one.
Of course they'll never properly patch this game, they've got millions of people's money so they're happy.
Keep in mind that different games might not tolerate the same clock speeds. HL2 is a good example. HL2 is more sensitive to overclocking then other games. I suspect that all the new crop of games are like this now. Doom 3 is another example I found.
I'm more concerned about their surprise
http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/
It's a shame that all the bugs, and everything to do with Steam, spoils it a bit.
Gonna buy em back tho on me next giro
Sorry to hear folks had such horrible probs with then game
Curious to know is there a hardware commonality to the probs...?
What hardware were you using?
Delayed once. And clearly you haven't played a lot of games.. considering this was a brand new (and pioneering) engine let alone a new game, this was a superb piece of work. And talk about optimised - I can play HL2 at 1280x1024 with 4x AA on my crappy cheapo 9600 Pro EZ card which is worth about £70.
I'll defend HL2 till I am blue in the face - yes, purchase, activation AND playing the game has basically been flawless for me, but I just think its a masterpiece.
Buggy... I didn't encounter any bugs and found the game to be truely amazing and worth every penny - also, as others have said, it was delayed once. Buggy would be Final Fantasy VII for PC, whereby a huge amount of people couldn't get past certain areas, or the game would repeatedly crash out at a particular scene.
Still, some people just like to whinge...
But I just felt HL2 was so damn innovative and had so many fresh ideas. I literally felt that HL2 was the best game EVER when I played three specific sections :
* Controlling the crane! So much fun! Smash some combine AND solve the puzzle..
* Playing catch with Dog. Alyx laughing and shouting encouragement, the great EAX echo effects, stunning graphics and lighting, the whole section just blew me away..
* The last level inside the alien base.. picking up the combine with the blue grav gun, firing them into things, pulling equipment off the walls and throwing it at people. Sheer genuis.
The game was a tour de force for Valve - lazy is the LAST thing they deserve to be called.
The game added so many new concepts... as mentioned, the crane was great, but also the sequence with the plane dropping bombs, which had a real arcadey feel to it. The buggy and airboat created a totally different atmosphere to the game that hasn't been seen before. Also, fighting in the crumbling City 17 with Striders abound felt really epic and immersed you in the game world.
The game is full of great new concepts that haven't been seen before, creating a truely compelling singleplayer experience. Also, while not to everyones liking, CounterStrike is the most popular online game (ever) and the Source update is incredibly fun, with the new effects for the flashbang changing the way the game is played to make it more fun.
It is a shame that there aren't that many CS
PS - All the dates that were "missed" weren't stated by Valve, but by outside sources that didn't know anything about it.
In fact the only gate given after Sept. 30th was an estimation that Valve would finish the game in October by Doug Lombardi - and they did. After October it was all about getting it done to Vivendi's satisfaction.
- controlling a crane.. or
- driving a buggy..
haven't actually played any other games, ever. No, really!
Halflife does do a lot of things nice.. for instance it seems very good at creating atmosphere, and the storyline is nice.. all without the use of cutscenes, or ever going out of first person mode.
but the engine isn't as great as people say, at least, for the most part to me it looks like every other engine that's come out recently with the addition of some now [almost] old hat shaders. the hl2 engine was revolutionary 2 years ago when they first showed it off, but it's really nothing special now.
halflife2 to me seems like it's trying to be all things to all men, and in the end does only 1 or 2 of them really well (at least better than those that came before). The close quarter gun fights are very intense, probably some of the best and most rewarding that i've seen since planetside. However the vehicle sections are weak, and overly repetitive which often goes to show the flaws in the havoc physics engine and did nothing more than reminding me of the vehicles in tony hawks underground1.. an amusing yer frustrating distraction designed to do nothing more than extend the play time of the game.
however for me that will be remembered from the game, by 1,000's of people is the fact that the game takes a very long tme to install, activate, load, and then insists on stuttering, and / or crashing. The best game in the world is rendered sub-par when it is accompnied by numerous high profile technical issues and problems.
Last edited by 27867 on 01 Dec 2004 - 22:56
And there are plenty of other reasons you might get this, not just texture thrashing, you need to run through some of the tweaking guides that are knoking about and see if it helps.
And no it's not "Full of bugs" (unless you count Antlions!!!) It has had some problems that have been worked out very fast, but the amount of people that have had NO problems far outstrip the ones that have.
Great work Valve (even though i did have "The Stutter"
Last edited by 4433 on 29 Nov 2004 - 17:36
Im guessing that the percentage with "The Stutter Bugs (there are 3 of them)" is quite low, and acording to valve "The Stutter Bugs" made up 95% of CS enquires.
It is to be expected, somehow...
Learn french and I shall laugh at your miserable and pathetic attempt to construct a sentence.
I agree totally with that. You should have known better than to come on neowin and not spell something properly or give an opinion that someone doesn't agree with.
This site is starting to suck with all these self righteous indignant mother f*ckers.
unfortunately counterstrike was designed for very low specced machines by todays standards, and i'm sure a lot of cs players really haven't kept abreast of hardware developments as much as gamers who play new games... it's easy to see why they're complacent, but equally, easy to see why they shouldn't be.
my 3800+ a64, sata 16mb cache 300gb drive and gf6800 gt plays the game just fine.
Last edited by 25229 on 30 Nov 2004 - 16:20
Here are my specs; dunno if it'll help anybody:
P4 3.4 GHz
1024 MB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 w/256 MB RAM
...and I suppose that's all that's really important here. My laptop could kill a small child if I dropped it.
That being said, I have noticed an intermittent frame rate reduction with this patch. This slowdown is particularly noticeable when looking at scenes with water. If I go into the video settings within Half-Life 2 and make any change that forces a restart of the rendering engine, the slowdown goes away. However in the course of playing through to a new level, the slowdown returns until I force a video restart in game again. In the feedback that I have seen via email and on various forums, this problem is not isolated to my system.
With this patch, Valve added a new console variable, mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware, which controls whether textures are preloaded into video memory during level load. By setting this variable to 0, you end up with same behavior as before the patch. Using Fraps I compared performance with this variable enabled and disabled to illustrate the new slowdown problem.
View Patch Performance Graphs
The first graph shows the performance of a recorded demo from the Water Hazard chapter. When the new texture preloading code is enabled, you can see that the overall frame rate is reduced by 10-15 FPS which is very noticeable during game play.
The other two graphs are screenshots with +showbudget enabled which shows the same scene with the texture preloading code enabled and disabled. You can see that new code causes periods of frame rate reduction, where as the bottom graph, with texture preloading disabled, is nice and smooth.
The end result, at least of my system, is that there is now a tradeoff. I can have a smooth overall frame rate, but with stuttering, or I can eliminate the stuttering but have intermittent frame rate decreases.
While this patch eliminated most of the stuttering for me, based on all the feedback I’ve seen, this patch definitely does not reduce it for everyone. I have forwarded all of this information to Valve and hope to get a response soon.
taken from www.blep.net
I have highlighted the 2 aspects in bold because they are exactly what is happening to myself. Although the stuttering is much better on my end, as a result I am getting this "slow down" of the game. i also ran FRAPS and my FPS would drop from 80-100 FPS to about 15-30 out of nowhere, and just as the writer wrote I actually have to change my graphic settings to get it to run normally again. Kind of fixed one thing, only to introduce a completely new problem.
i am at " Black Mesa East " and just a bit ahead there is an elevator
the elevator comes up , my character can move ...therez a girl character
that does not moves ..... i guess shez supposed to company me down the
elevator ! any one can tell what am i supposed to download
My version doesn't have that problem. Apart from a couple anomalies here and there, nothing major.
On the official Steam web site's news page, they talk about releasing a patch to fix the stuttering problems very soon.
I myself didn't have any or very little stuttering because my computer's ace! And I have an ATi Radeon 9800 PRO
They've released a patch already but I haven't heard anything about other methods.
Maybe they will create a external patch after they've fixed the common problems. Sort of like a christmas gift.
http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/#041127103530
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=250053
I hope they release another patch that fixes all the stuttering I'm having. If not oh well, its still a really awesome game. My favorite FPS to date. It threw Return to Castle Wolfenstein off the top for me
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