Stuttering update

February 10th, 2006 :: Steam updates :: 9 Responses

I don’t normally cover game updates, but this one is important enough to make an exception for. A part of the current Friends beta is an update to the Source engine aimed at the longstanding stuttering issue. And what do you know? It works. With mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware enabled in the console, the only noticeable stutters on my system are from autosaves.

To see for yourself, add -beta steam3friends -clientbeta steam3friends to your Steam shortcut, as described here.

9 Responses to this post:

Comments

February 11th, 2006 at 3:10 am ::
Andrew Timson Says:

Hmm. For me, adding mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware actually made things worse (at least, on the first map, which is all that I played for my testing); while the minor stutters went away, I noticed several major ones (mainly during the G-man’s speech) that I hadn’t noticed before I turned it on.
February 11th, 2006 at 10:06 am ::
Wizpig64 Says:

If you mean the way Gman talks, than that isn’t anything wrong with your PC. Unofficially, The Gman is not used to human speech, and thats why he talks funny.
February 11th, 2006 at 10:38 am ::
Wizpig64 Says:

Aha! Go to http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-05-30 for a more sarcastic explanation. Dont forget to read the notes at the bottom!
February 11th, 2006 at 11:00 am ::
Tom Edwards Says:

How big is your heap, Andy? It should say in the console.

It’s amazing how much more fun Source games are now they are smooth. I’ve played chunks of HL2 and the whole of Lost Coast and Minerva; it’s like they are brand new.

Oh, and don’t you mean http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-07-22 Wizpig? 😉
February 11th, 2006 at 10:29 pm ::
Wizpig64 Says:

Either one could explain it. But when he said “(mainly during the G-man’s speech)” I thought of that first. 😀
February 12th, 2006 at 1:33 am ::
Andrew Timson Says:

If you mean the way Gman talks, than that isn’t anything wrong with your PC.

No, that’s not what I mean; it’s hitching in the sound file loading, not the way he’s supposed to sound. If it were just the G-man’s speech patterns, well, then why would I have thought it was new from before I turned the option on? 😉

Heap size is listed as 256 MB. Given that I have 1.5 GB of RAM, shouldn’t it be bigger? And if so, how do I increase it?

(I’m definitely video card limited–2.8 GHz P4, 1.5 GB RAM, but only a Radeon 9000. On the other hand, I’m only running at 800×600, so it shouldn’t be too bad….)
February 12th, 2006 at 6:07 am ::
Wizpig64 Says:

I assume the problem may be with your sound card as well, but I have not the knowledge about it. :\
February 12th, 2006 at 8:46 am ::
Tom Edwards Says:

That heap is fine. You don’t need any more precisely because of the caching system that causes (or should I say caused) the problems!