Choppiness in HL2:Ep1

[Inspector Jihad]

I just finished HL2 and started playing Ep1 but its being very choppy every now and then. HL2 didn't do this...i can't really update my drivers since i have an agp 3850 and the drivers are so fucked for that thing. any ideas on what i could do?

 

[Karsten]

Going with the obvious.... did you update the drivers?

 

[TheStu]

I seem to recall reading/hearing/sensing/tasting that Ep1 is more demanding on a system than HL2 is alone, but my understanding that you could put a stick of gum in your AGP/PCIe slot and so long as it has 'ATi' written on the side of it, you would get good FPS in HL2 games.

You shouldn't be having too many problems with your rig, what other games do you play and how is their performance? I recall that on my AMD64 3800+ with 2GB RAM, and 7800GTX I didn't have too many problems with the episodes, at least nothing that I wasn't able to put up with, and I am a huge quality snob.

Have you tried dialing back the eye candy? Starting with Anti Aliasing, Filtering, and shadows. Oh, and the water effects, those can put a toll on your system.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

about the drivers...the agp 3850 is a mess i installed the latest version that works, whcih is like 8.7 from 2008. i turned down the HDR to 'bloom' which did the trick for the most part. ep1 crashed a bunch of times. interestingly, ep2 works a lot better...i dunno if the version of source on that is more tuned or what. anyway, i can play now. i do alright with tf2 and css, but css crashes every now and then too.

 

[2dt Drifter]

I seem to recall that FPS stuttering used to to happen when the computer would load the sound files for the "next session" of the game. Anyone remember the command to pre-load all of the sounds into the cache before playing? I heard that fixed a lot of people's problems.

 

[digitaldurandal]

Turn off HDR.

 

[RajunCajun]

Open your Steam folder, My Games. Right click the game of choice and go into Properties. Click through the tabs till you find something like Defragment Files, then run it. I do this for each game every once in awhile and this helps to get rid of stuttering.

If this doesn't help much you can redownload the game files from there.

Hope this helps!

 

[DominionSeraph]

VSYNC?

I was having issues with HL2 dropping to 1/3rd refresh until I disabled VSYNC.

 

[fleshconsumed]

I usually like to disable buffering. Even with GTX260 enabling double/triple buffering introduces huge input lag into the game. Not sure if that's the choppiness you're seeing, but I would disable that too. Disable vsync too like previous poster has said.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

i disabled v-sync. i think it was the HDR that was causing the problems.

 

[Demo24]

Ep1 was when they decided to debut HDR lighting to the source engine. It didn't exactly work wonderfully, but it did kinda work. Still, it wasn't very optimized and caused some problems. Thus ep2 should run better for you as the 'orange box' engine(just source upgraded) seems to be quite stable and reasonably efficient for what it does. TF2 is on that engine, but css is not.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

Ep1 was when they decided to debut HDR lighting to the source engine. It didn't exactly work wonderfully, but it did kinda work. Still, it wasn't very optimized and caused some problems. Thus ep2 should run better for you as the 'orange box' engine(just source upgraded) seems to be quite stable and reasonably efficient for what it does. TF2 is on that engine, but css is not.

then that makes sense...css and ep1 run poorly compared to tf2 and ep2.

 

[totalnoob]

Knock the resolution down to 1024x768 That might seem low, but honestly you probably won't notice a difference after 30 seconds of playing. Resolution makes a huge difference on weaker cards.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

i figured i'd just ask here instead of makign a new topic, but what do you guys know about the multicore rendering option in tf2? does it actually increase performance?