Half Life 2 Stutter Issue. Any Tips to Improve Performance?

Like most people, I get annoyed by the stutter issue that occurs when playing Half Life 2. It runs very smooth and most of my other games such as Doom 3, Far Cry, etc run very smooth too...but Half Life 2 is the only game that's giving me a lot of those small load stutters when events occur.
Now I've heard that even PCs with a AMD64 2.6Ghz CPU, GeForce 7800GTX, 2GB DDR 3200 Ram, Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS Gamer, and 100-500GB SATA Hardrives at 7200rpm (maybe even 10,000-15,000 rpm...but I'm not sure) are getting the stutter issue in Half Life 2. A monstrous machine and yet the game still lags with events. Obviously it's the code instead of your system.

I've read tweak guides, but their full of too many options. Which tweaks do you recommend the most to reduce the stutter issue?

Here's a perfect example of Half Life 2's Stutters: http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/HL2Stutter.wmv
That's exactly how it is normally, but sometimes (about 3 times now) a 4-10 second Lag occurs before a major event such as 15 CP coming after me.

maybe its a bug in the game itself.


have u checked for a patch on steam or something?

Have you tried reinstalling it? Maybe you have that one special new lighting effect and your graphics card doesnt support it? Turn it off, I do!

I use a 7800GT, so it should be able to support any of today's new effects.
Yes, I've tried installing it in another copy of Windows XP I only use for gaming (runs faster with a very small registry and no crap enabled in xp)

Steam auto-updates the game, so it's already up to date. (I saw it finish the update anyways)
They are still trying to resolve the issue. Hopefully they'll release another patch soon. I disabled the 3D menu and the games loads up much faster.
Also, what's up with the saved game overload? If you have 10+ saves in your save/load menus, the game bottlenecks to open those two menus. I can only have 2-3, so it'll open up fast...without the bottleneck that loops sound. Half Life 1 has the same issue with it's save/load menus. They cannot be overloaded with saves, or else your going to have a bottleneck when you try to view em. :( Windows XP doesn't bottleneck when it displays thumbnails, so Half Life games shouldn't either.

nothing is wrong with the game. it's a known issue with steam since that crap came out. dl the game and everything is fine.

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Originally Posted by orcutt989

Have you tried reinstalling it? Maybe you have that one special new lighting effect and your graphics card doesnt support it? Turn it off, I do!

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lol u mean HDR? :01:

Yes, I have the same issue with the machine in my sig running at almost max settings.

No, the stutters become barely noticeble when I turn down AA and AF just a bit.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seedler

Yes, I have the same issue with the machine in my sig running at almost max settings.

No, the stutters become barely noticeble when I turn down AA and AF just a bit.

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I'll try that. thanks for the tip