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[007rocks]

Hello,

I have been running into a weird issue randomly when playing GE:S.

Randomly, a sound clip will start repeating, the video will go extremely slow like maybe a frame every 2-3 seconds and then I finally regain control and everything works like normal.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

Thanks!

[Emilia]

It sounds like computer lag. I get this too. I play on a laptop that is starting to get old and outdated.

It sucks, because now I have to play on the lowest settings.

What kind of computer do you have?

[Jonathon [SSL]]

It's related to your computer not loading the sounds fast enough for the Source Engine.


Source, in order to save memory, only loads the first 125 ms of each sound that's defined in the sound cache files. So, every time you play a new sound that hasn't been played before and therefore not fully loaded into memory, the engine has to wait for the hard drive to send it the sound data. If it doesn't get the full data before the cached 125 ms are played, it re-loops back to the beginning of the 125 ms until the full sound gets loaded and played.


Even on my quad-core computer with 6 GB of RAM I get this issue occasionally, and it happens more frequently the older your computer or slower you hard drive (happened a lot more on my old computer).


More technical info:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Soundcache

[Mangley]

Make sure you have hardware acceleration turned on in your Windows sound options.

[007rocks]

Thanks for the speedy responses!

I have a new system with an i7, sli 460s, and no sound card (mobo sound). I have never encountered this sound issue before in other games.

My hard drive is an eco barracuda green hard drive so it is definitely not very fast. It could probably be causing the issue of not loading sounds fast enough.

Is there perhaps a setting in valve to up the cache size? Or some other way to mitigate the issue?

Thanks!