Am I a complete geek or what ?

[gobbledonk]

Thanks Khun Kong - its both heartening and disappointing to know that this is a widespread problem - Valve had (literally) months to thoroughly test HL2 on every config imaginable ...

 

Stutter or no, I wouldnt mind having the system our reviewer has under his desk:

 

Asus P4C800-E w/ 1016 BIOS

Intel Pentium 4 3.0C

1 GB PC-3200 DDR SDRAM

ATI RADEON X800 XT PE AGP w/ 4.12 beta CATALYST drivers

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum eX w/ latest drivers

Western Digital 7200 RPM WD-2000JD 200GB HD

Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2

[gobbledonk]

One thing that didnt get a mention on the aforementioned page was the old 'my hard drive cant handle it'. Whilst this post was pooh-poohed by some on /., others swear by it:

 

Hard Drive performance is a HUGE importance and a huge factor in these sound skipping issues. I had it very badly when I first tried to play: try to pick something up and whack something; the sound would skip etc. The hard drive was thrashing like hell non-stop. To solve it I did 2 things. First of all: for launch options I entered: -heapsize 262144 - basically this forces HL2 to use the specified amount of RAM (in kb) - I have 512mb so entered 256. This means more data gets cached into memory rathar than rely on it being streamed at the time from the HD. Seconldy, and most importantly, when I first installed my Nvidia Nforce 2 drivers i chose not to install their IDE Driver. Going back and installing this IDE driver made an absolute HUGE difference in performance of the game. This IDE driver lowers overheads when transfering data, especially when multiple writes / access are occuring... ie. in games like HL2. And voila, no problems for me. How Valve will "release a fix" for this I have no idea, since a lot of the problems can be based on poor IDE drivers and HD performance etc. My only thinking is that they make the game pre-cache most if not all of the sounds... this though could have other side effects; much longer load times, and problems with computers who have limited memory as it is.