Stuttering in Half-Life 2 Demo

[Lordchander]

Hey guys, just registered in order to find a possible fix to a problem I've been having. I've only fairly recently discovered Half-Life, I wanted to get HL2 as soon as I saw some videos, but my computer was way too old to handle it, so instead I got the original Half-Life; played perfectly and it's a beautiful game.

About 1 week ago I got a new computer custom built, so it's brand spanking new in every way, here's my system stats:

Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ 3.01GHz
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT
4GB RAM
32-bit Operating System
500GB HDD

Now, I now it says 32-bit Operating System, but I was led to believe by the computer salesman who I got this computer from, that it was a 64-bit edition. Or is the 64-bit part for the motherboard or something? I'm not entirely sure about those aspects of things, so if someone could also clear this up for me, I would appreciate the help.

Anyway, I am now able to play Half-Life 2, so I got the demo from Steam just to double-check, and I am greeted by the beautifully rendered face of the G-Man, the game runs smoothly and perfectly on high settings, yet every 5-8 seconds the games FPS drops low and the video and sound stutters. This will last for about 4-5 second in which the game will then run perfectly smooth again, then after another 5-8 eight seconds of smoothness it will drop and stutter again.

Now I had this exact same problem with Half-Life 1 one I tried installing it on this new computer and I managed to fix it by switching my colour scheme from "Windows Aero" to "Windows Vista Basic". Yet this fix won't work for HL2 for some reason. I've tried changing resolutions, colour modes, compatibility modes, even attempted to change some video card settings, but all to no avail. I've also defragmented the game cache files and verified the integrity of them in Steam, but still nothing

As you can imagine, I'm quite annoyed by this as I don't want to have to get HL2 and find it does this exact same thing, so I want to see if there is a fix for it before I spend money on a game that won't run properly.

Sorry for the essay, but I needed to get my situation across properly.

Cheers

 

[Kula Meenur]

What's your frame rate mate?



Bring up the in-game diagnostic window

 

[Lordchander]

When the game is running smoothly the FPS meter shows anywhere between 80-100 fps (quite hard to tell it moves so fast), and when it stutters and lags and slows down to 1-5 fps (seriously!).

EDIT: Now, the FPS for smooth says anywhere between 100-200 fps, unless I'm just seeing things, regardless it's very smooth with no lag, until it stutters.

 

[Druckles]

You're running a game on Vista.

Sorry, not helpful . It sounds to me like a memory problem. Have you had this problem with any other game?

 

[Laivasse]

You're talking like your machine is a relatively new purchase (...?) so it might just need a teensy bit of polishing before it will run games optimally.

First of all, try updating your graphics drivers from the Nvidia site. You might find that the latest drivers vastly improve performance, or a bit of googling might reveal exactly what version drivers are best for the 8600GT. While you're at it, though this is less important than the graphic drivers, use Everest Home Edition to identify the precise make of your motherboard, etc. and download the latest drivers for all the rest of your hardware from the respective manufacturer's sites if you feel like it. The site of the place where you got your PC may also have a support page where all the drivers are collated, although this is sometimes out of date.

Try killing any resource-intensive background processes through Task Manager - anti-virus and beefy apps like that are all potentially hefty enough to make your frame rate plummet occasionally, and since it's a prebuilt machine there's a good chance that they've chucked on a ton of useless bloatware at the shop/factory that you don't need. Turning it off may give you that critical bit of smoother performance. Where possible/desirable, try to set it so that each program in question doesn't run at startup.

If that doesn't work, try the pagedpoolsize fix which worked wonders for many people, although be aware that it involves editing your registry which can be risky if you screw up. Generally it's fine though.

Finally - it just might be the HL2 demo. While the original HL2 and it's successors have received a multitude of updates and patches over the years, I'm not sure if they even apply to the demo version. There's a good chance that it suffers the problems that vanilla HL2 had when it first came out (including, among others, a much more pronounced stutter bug for many people). The fact that you had this problem in another game could make this a little unlikely but it's still definitely possible.

When all's said and done, you have a decent rig which should have no problems whatsoever running HL2 in its full glory (although its expansions are more demanding). An 8600GT is still a decent enough card, and the whole 'VISTA LOL' factor isn't really an issue any more for gaming. If you want me to go out on a limb and guess what is causing this, from your description it sounds like a background process crapping on your parade, but any of the other above issues could also be the cause.

Aside: It does sound like you might have been gypped by the salesman. You have a processor that's capable of running 64bit applications, but that isn't saying much because as far as I'm aware pretty much all of them do nowadays. You do need a 64bit OS if you want to be able to make use of your full 4Gb of RAM - 32bit OSes can only utilise something like 3Gb and a bit, and according to your specs you do indeed have a 32bit version of Vista. Whoever sold this to you should have been aware of this, so they've either promised you Vista64 and not delivered, or knowingly given you about 1Gb of RAM that you can't use at the moment. This is not an unusual situation to be in, however, and it shouldn't make any real difference to performance (in fact you probably have a more stable setup as you are...).

 

[Druckles]

Holy crap, Vista does have the same limitation as XP.

Yeah, you've been slightly conned. Unless you don't mind a few MB of wasted RAM.

 

[Laivasse]

Yeah. I want to emphasise to the OP that this isn't exactly a scandal though. I would guess that tons of people buy 4Gb of RAM without being made fully aware that they will only be able to utilise it all with the right OS. What really does stink is if the salesman told you you'd be getting the 64bit version of Vista and you got the 32bit version - that might be worth getting on the phone about.

There are a couple of drawbacks with Vista x64 that you don't suffer in the 32 bit version. One is that you can't install drivers that aren't digitally signed (though I think that might have changed with SP1). Another is that it doesn't support 16-bit code, which is generally not a problem but the installers of some apps are still written in this way - I have Vista x64 and a few aging utilities I have archived don't like to install any more. Some people claim it's also less stable, but I haven't found stability to be a problem. Anyway, something of a silver lining for you if you find you're stuck with the 32-bit one.

 

[Lordchander]

Okay, first off thanks for all the info and willingness to help! It's great to see people helping others out like this!

Well, I downloaded the latest drivers and rebooted my computer, but the problem is still happening, I've also tried closing as many resource intensive programs as possible, including my Anti-virus, yet still the problem persists.

I even tried other 3D games that I have, and as previously stated Half-Life no longer does it and the only other full 3D game I own on the PC is Age of Mythology, which doesn't do it at all. In one final test I even tried logging into my old runescape account, and interestingly enough, the stuttering DID occur, but much less often and less severe. I'm at a loss of what to do, and I'd really like to play HL2 but I'm not going to bother if I'm going to have the immersion of the game ruined by annoying lag, especially when the game DOES work smoothly any other time.

Regardless, thanks for all your help everyone, much appreciated!

 

[Laivasse]

Bit of a mystery then. One thing you could try just to make sure it really isn't a background process is to open Task Manager while you have no big apps running and just watch for any spikes in CPU usage. If nothing happens then I guess that really isn't the problem.

Another thing to try is different launch parameters. In Properties > Set Launch Options, add the line '-heapsize 1024000' (without quotes) which will allocate 1Gb of memory for the game to use (with your setup you can probably get away with allocating up to 1.5Gb). See if that causes any improvement.

If it doesn't, try '-nosound' which will start the game up without sound (the characters' lips don't move either so Gman will just give you a nice long stare). If you just play through it for a few minutes you'll probably be able to tell whether the framerate drops have gone away or not. Obviously you can't play the game without sound, but if this does eradicate the problem then it may at least narrow the problem down to something audio-related. ...Quite what you can do from there on, I don't know, but if that's on the right track then maybe updating your sound device drivers would be in order.

I'm inclined to think that you wouldn't get this problem in the full version of HL2, but who knows.

 

[Operational]

I'd be very surprised if it's a background process that is the problem, your computer is beefy enough that it shouldn't matter. On the other hand it's a new store bought computer so there is likely a whole bunch of crap on there you don't need, but even so I doubt that they would cause a 150fps drop.

Steam support has this page but you have tried most of what is there.

This might sound like a cop out but I'd buy the game, like Laivasse said it's very possible that there is a bug in the demo that was fixed in the full version a long time ago - I know I haven't heard about stuttering complaints in a long while. And it's harder to find better value than the Orange Box.

If you are worried about the stuttering being a computer wide issue and not just a HL2 issue you could try downloading a benchmark program like 3Dmark and keeping an eye on the FPS while it runs.

One is that you can't install drivers that aren't digitally signed (though I think that might have changed with SP1)

It didn't.