Steam News has posted an update on the HL2 stuttering bug. Valve is close to getting it fixed. For the first time,
they're clear on the details of the bug, as well. Some were worried that Valve was only working on the sound aspect of
the bug, but it ends up that the sound problem is indicative of a video problem.
From the post:
The changes in this release are directed at reducing the problem some users are experiencing with sound stuttering.
The sound stuttering is not indicative of a sound problem, sound stuttering is only a symptom of texture thrashing on
your video card or AGP memory. For information on how to reduce texture thrashing visit this link on our support
site:
http://steampowered.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/ph…
This update will fix sound stuttering that users were experiencing that would last for longer than a few seconds
during normal gameplay. This update will also eliminate this same behavior following a quicksave or autosave. There
will still be a short pause while the autosave happens, but not the more drawn out stuttering behavior.
We are still investigating another performance problem on some hardware, which will manifest where the game is getting
into a state where performance drops to less than 5 fps and does not recover or crashes.
Next week we will be releasing the Source SDK, along with a surprise for the community.
