Not sure what happened to all the threads, but I think we need a thread to keep track of the issue so that everyone can know any progress and also so we can all know when a fix is found.
What we do know:
Hardware independent - the problem is found from onboard sound to audigy 2 to high-end studio sound cards, from Radeon 7000 to X800XT PE, normal HDDs to Raid arrays, 256 mb of ram to 1.5 gb of ram, etc.
Defragging, getting more ram, and using tweaks can improve the problem, but usually doesn't fix it. Just sometimes makes it less noticable. People with cutting edge computers with lots of RAM and a defragmented, clean HDD still have the problem.
It is NOT an autosave issue. It happens to most people with the problem every few seconds, even while G-Man is talking during the intro.
Cache size in HL2 and the aperture size don't matter.
It IS a bug with the game.
Some of the tweaks that have improved stuff for some people -
autoexec.cfg:
snd_mixahead 0.7 [ default is 0.1, increasing gradually from .2 to 1.0 has seemed to fix the problem ]
cl_forcepreload 1
sv_forcepreload 1
cl_smooth 0
snd_async_fullyasync 1 [sounds are played whenever the computer gets them and the graphics won't slow down to wait]
In launch options in Steam:
-heapsize 262144 [set it to half your ram or however much you want. defaults to 64 mb]
Lowering detail IMO is an unacceptable way to fix this for people whose framerates are great bar the stutters.
What we do know:
Hardware independent - the problem is found from onboard sound to audigy 2 to high-end studio sound cards, from Radeon 7000 to X800XT PE, normal HDDs to Raid arrays, 256 mb of ram to 1.5 gb of ram, etc.
Defragging, getting more ram, and using tweaks can improve the problem, but usually doesn't fix it. Just sometimes makes it less noticable. People with cutting edge computers with lots of RAM and a defragmented, clean HDD still have the problem.
It is NOT an autosave issue. It happens to most people with the problem every few seconds, even while G-Man is talking during the intro.
Cache size in HL2 and the aperture size don't matter.
It IS a bug with the game.
Some of the tweaks that have improved stuff for some people -
autoexec.cfg:
snd_mixahead 0.7 [ default is 0.1, increasing gradually from .2 to 1.0 has seemed to fix the problem ]
cl_forcepreload 1
sv_forcepreload 1
cl_smooth 0
snd_async_fullyasync 1 [sounds are played whenever the computer gets them and the graphics won't slow down to wait]
In launch options in Steam:
-heapsize 262144 [set it to half your ram or however much you want. defaults to 64 mb]
On second thought, before lowering the texture detail, lower your sound quality. This has fixed the skipping problem for a lot of people without a noticable loss in sound quality. The loss of texture detail will be much more noticable.
-Gary McTaggart (Valve)
-Gary McTaggart (Valve)
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