Half-Life 2 Troubleshooting & Spec discussion

[marcus]

In order to make things easier, please can you post all hardware spec related and any technical problems regarding Half-Life 2 here. This includes general graphics card discussion, frame rates and so on.

[Rushy]

Haven't actually started playing it yet but I set up the game as intended and found that with my SB Live 5.1 the rear speakers did not function. This appeared to be fixed by changing the sound setting from to medium. I hear this is a common problem with Sound Blaster cards.

And I tried the stress test to see how my computer would handle the game at 1024*768 with everything set to high (no antisrophic filtering or Anti aliasing) and I got a 89.3fps average (P4 3.2HT / 1GB DRR400 / 9700Pro)

[Ravon]

AMD 3.2, 1 gig 3200 DDR, 9600XT.

Game runs fine when it works.. looks great with everything on High, but no AA on.. i get the same issue with sound and my 5.1 i will have a go at setting it to medium
But after 5 mins of play it crashes out to eitehr the desktop or even resets the Fing PC ...latest Cat drivers installed, made no difference. And no other 3d intensive games have this problem like (Doom 3) I wll have another look at it tonight ...before i smash the pc

[Ratso]

Hi.

Logged on to the net via my 56k (at a painful 28.8kbps - must be my local exchange I think).

Managed to get Steam past the first 'updating platform' xx% stage and got to create a user name and password.

Then it went to another 'updating steam platform' type message, with an empty bar in it. One yellow block filled in quite quickly, but then I left it while I had dinner and though the modem traffic was constant, the bar filled up no further and no 'percentage complete' type message appeared.

Task manager described Steam as 'Not responding' though the modem traffic continued apace. I left it a bit longer but then decided to retry from the 'log-in' stage of Steam. Same thing - lots of modem traffic but Steam 'not responding'.

Anyone any ideas as to how long I should expect this stage to take (given my slow dial-up speed)?

Would it have been that at 6pm yesterday evening there were still many users trying the same things as me at the same time?

Should I just leave it going, or is it not even worth attempting until I get broadband installed next week?

[Spatial]

latest Cat drivers installed

Are they the 4.12 beta drivers ? If not give them a try, it might work ?

[Chadruharazzeb]

I've heard (no pun intended) that the 5.1 sound issue can be fixed by installing ffdshow codec. I've always had that installed and my 5.1 is working fine - it didn't at first, but seems to have fixed itself.

For the first time ever I don't seem to be having any problmes when so many others are. It's normally the exact opposite. :knocks wood:

[VR46]

Similar vein to another topic of mine, just curious what the "minimum spec" machine anyone has this running on (cpu/graphics/memory wise) be it completely scaled down detail levels or "medium" levels.

Cheers.

[Spatial]

I just had to update my Soundblaster Live 5.1 driver to the XP version to get it too work properly - for some reason the one from the UK Creative site made no difference, but the one from the US site worked

The old driver on my system must have been a Win 98 release but had worked fine on every other game up until then....

[MartyG]

Just been to register the game with Vivendi - and Half Life 2 isn't listed in the games selection. Well done.

[Chadruharazzeb]

lol, I noticed that as well. And promptly gave up.

[Ravon]

Well the only thing that seems to make it stable on my pc is if i quick save as soon as it loads... WTF.. thats a little weird but at least it don't crash now..

[MartyG]

Damn game won't run on my X800 machine, it just keeps resetting. Is anyone else running an X800 Pro and having issues with HL2? XP OS SP2, Athlon XP3000+, 1GB RAM and latest catalyst drivers.

Edit - oh and CS:Source stress test runs fine and hits 86fps at 1024x768, and the game runs fine too, it's just HL2.

[Rushy]

For those with the sound problem this 'may' help:


Try:

snd_async_fullyasync 1

See if it's any better. It might de-sync some of the dialog, but it should remove the stuttering.

Use snd_async_fullyasync 0 to turn it back off.

We're looking into the problem, but it would help to know if this solves it for you.

Thanks,
Rick (Rick Ellis, Valve Software, Senior Engineering Lead)
Valve

[Concept]

It unsyncs dialogue and sounds however.

Try these as well:

http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread.php?p=378527#post378527

http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread.php?p=379176#post379176

[Chadruharazzeb]

Has anyone seen any decent low-end bencmarks yet? There's what sounds like it could be a decent article at Toms Hardware, but rather oddly there doesn't seem to be anything after the first page. If anyone finds the missing article please let me know!