May have to shelf TF2 until Valve fixes stuttering issue

Tek7

Tek7

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Staff member
I've been having problems with TF2 stuttering during gameplay and it seems I'm not the only one.

These three threads on the official Steam forums indicate this is a fairly common issue.

I don't have the same problem in any other games, so I may wait until Valve resolves this issue in an upcoming patch before playing TF2 extensively again.

EDIT: I went ahead and submitted a ticket to Valve support. Here's hoping they reply to this ticket more quickly than the last one.
 
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UPDATE: I ran TF2 using the -nosound command line parameter and there was hardly any stuttering at all. This leads me to believe that the stuttering is caused by an issue with my sound card and/or drivers.
 
I had a similar issue with the killer network card I was running, it really messed up my sound and it would cause L4D to crash in lobbies. Now for some reason I have my desktop set up to a static ip for my network so I can open ports and my sound in TF2 changed (like I lost all bass) weird.
 
Whon said:
I had a similar issue with the killer network card I was running, it really messed up my sound and it would cause L4D to crash in lobbies. Now for some reason I have my desktop set up to a static ip for my network so I can open ports and my sound in TF2 changed (like I lost all bass) weird.
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I have an Intel 5100 Wireless-N Half Mini-card in my notebook computer, so I doubt it's the same issue or related to my network card(s). :(
 
Nah, I know it's not the same just similar in the extent that some random driver was causing issues with other drivers for the game.
 
i'm not having any stuttering issues with tf2. What are the full specs of the machines having this issue?
 
You may want to try that Multicore support in the options, that seemed to help me some. I rarely stutter in-game, but it has happened to me too.
 
Hescominsoon said:
i'm not having any stuttering issues with tf2. What are the full specs of the machines having this issue?
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  • Dell Studio 1737
  • Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 (2.0GHz, 800MHz bus, 2M L2 cache)
  • Mobility Radeon HD 3650 (using version 9.3 of ATI display drivers, modified using Mobility Modder)
  • IDT High Definition Audio Codec (using latest drivers downloaded from Dell web site)
  • 2GB PC2-5300 RAM
  • Vista Ultimate SP1
  • Intel 5100 Wireless-N Half Mini-card
Need any other specs?
Keero said:
You may want to try that Multicore support in the options, that seemed to help me some. I rarely stutter in-game, but it has happened to me too.
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If I understood correctly, "multicore" only refers to a very small percentage of video cards, not processors with multiple cores. I could be mistaken, though.
 
I had the stuttering issue back when I had my old computer. I fixed much of it by increasing the default memory allocated to the game. Add the -heapsize [Kilobytes] launch option to indicate how much memory you want to allocate to the game. More information about it here: http://www.tweakguides.com/HL2_7.html

I also found defragging my system files helped. That can only be done with an advanced defrag program, such as PerfectDisk. There is a free trial version: http://www.perfectdisk.com/home It is an all around better defrag program than the default Windows version, so do both a standard defrag and a system file defrag (which are two different types of defragging).

I'm also pretty sure the new multicore support is for processors.
 
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Tek7 said:
  • Dell Studio 1737
  • Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 (2.0GHz, 800MHz bus, 2M L2 cache)
  • Mobility Radeon HD 3650 (using version 9.3 of ATI display drivers, modified using Mobility Modder)
  • IDT High Definition Audio Codec (using latest drivers downloaded from Dell web site)
  • 2GB PC2-5300 RAM
  • Vista Ultimate SP1
  • Intel 5100 Wireless-N Half Mini-card
Need any other specs?
If I understood correctly, "multicore" only refers to a very small percentage of video cards, not processors with multiple cores. I could be mistaken, though.
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no multicore support is for cpu not gpu. Valve has updated the source engine to support multiple cores hence the option in tf2.
 
Hescominsoon said:
no multicore support is for cpu not gpu. Valve has updated the source engine to support multiple cores hence the option in tf2.
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Well, blast.

I'll turn on multicore support tonight and give it a try.
 
Enabling multicore support didn't help. If anything, it made it worse. :(

I followed Sacrifice's suggestion and added the -heapsize parameter to my command line, specifying 768MB of RAM for TF2. It doesn't entirely resolve the issue, but it helps (some times more than others). The stuttering seems less frequent after the first 3-5 minutes of gameplay using the -heapsize parameter.
 
have you tried playing on a non-wireless connection? Wifi can have latency and dropping issues that you won't notice until you do something real-time like gaming.
 
It happens to me too, when your character seems to be stuck in place...

It is very annoying and has only started recently for me. Though, I rarely played before and after I built my computer, so it could be my new computer or it could be the game.

The basic specs of my computer are:

  • AMD Phenom 9850
  • Gigabyte GA-MA7090GP-DS4H
  • ATI Radeon HD4870 (512)
  • 8gigs of DDR1066 ram
 
Hescominsoon said:
have you tried playing on a non-wireless connection?
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I have no issues with any other games on wireless and, aside from some issues caused by Mediacom overloading their nodes, I get a consistent ping to our server.

Played on a wired connection is not an option as my notebook is not in the same room as the router and I refuse to run a 50-ft. network cable just to play TF2 when it should work as well as every other game I play online.

Just to clarify: The entire game (both audio and video) stutter on my notebook computer. It is not just the sound that stutters. I've seen latency and choke issues before; this is not the same.

When I disable sound, the game does not stutter. I have updated my audio drivers to the latest version available from Dell. I was unable to find any drivers directly distributed by IDT (manufacturers of the IDT High Definition Audio Codec, which is what is installed on my notebook).

Adding the -heapsize parameter to the command line and allocating 768MB RAM to the game helps, but doesn't resolve the issue entirely.

Other people who report the same or similar issues seem to be using more current hardware.
 
The issue is resource contention. your audio is software based so it is going to take cpu cycles to process...on a notebook which run slower, narrower data busses this is going to contend with other facets on the system(like graphics) which is why when you turn off the sound everything runs fine. I'm not sure tf2 is NOT going to stutter on that machine with the sound on at any time. as tf2 is highly resource intensive..not just cpu intensive.

I am using my motherboard's ati HD audio(which is software based.) but i also have a quad core system with no anti-virus. I saw another poster here with a quad core system using the idt audio with stuttering. Don't get the driver for your manufacturer find it from idt(i'll hunt for one) also if you have a/v installed get rid of it and try again. idt bought out sigmatel btw.
 
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Hescominsoon said:
The issue is resource contention. your audio is software based so it is going to take cpu cycles to process...on a notebook which run slower, narrower data busses this is going to contend with other facets on the system(like graphics) which is why when you turn off the sound everything runs fine. I'm not sure tf2 is NOT going to stutter on that machine with the sound on at any time. as tf2 is highly resource intensive..not just cpu intensive.
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My processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo T6400, running 2 cores at 2.0GHz. Shouldn't that be more than enough to process the audio?
 
Hmmph, been stuttering a lot more, graphically. It has to be the recent update.
 
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