[CubaLibre]

So I have this here new laptop. Source games (and no others - though they are all my newest games) experience a weird, occasional choppiness. Occasionally, on average every 15-20 minutes, the choppiness doesn't resolve after a few seconds and locks the game, at which point I have to Ctrl-Alt-Del and etc. But that's just an average; sometimes it's 30 seconds and sometimes it's an hour.

Sparks and flashes of light seem to be the trigger. The SMG in Ep2 causes it a lot. The HW Guy's gun in TF2 is pretty much death.

Felix in the Ep2 thread recommended that I force dx 8.1 and turn off HDR. This slightly lowered the frequency of the problems but they remained in full effect. Then he recommended setting sound quality to Medium, which doesn't seem to have done anything.

The game runs silky smooth in between these choppy moments; it's not a general lack of performance on the part of my hardware. Something specific is fucking with my video card (I think). Can someone help me?
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Let's Play, starring me.

[km]

Did you try asking Valve? Their database of problems and fixes is actually pretty extensive.


Though last time I had this strange problem where my input would stop and then catch up and do all kinds of weird shit. Valve support was like "Yeah, we know about it, that sucks. If you fix it, let us know!"
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vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[DJ]

Sound driver issues can do that sometimes.

Though if your laptop is brand new you probably have updated drivers.

Update your drivers for your hardware is all I can think of off the top of my head.
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[Toptube]

sounds like a ram leak.

could be your system (windows) in general fucking up from all of the pre-loaded bullshit.

a dood I know who just bought a laptop with vista, at an idle it was hitting the processor with 30% usesage from all of the background pre-loaded shit.

or it could be drivers not playing nice.

what video card is in your laptop? laptop video drivers from manufacturers are always prohibitively out of date. nvidia and ati have new drivers for a few mobile video cards posted on their website. for the ones that they don't have drivers posted for, you have to go find modded drivers, or a thing that will mod a regular desktop driver for you.

just tell me what video card you have and I'll do the work for you.

[Toptube]

ok so it looks like ATI's mobile graphics support is pretty good nowadays, so you have two choices, go the ati.com and get drivers from there. they should support most or all of their mobile chips.

or you can get omegadrivers. these are "modded" drivers, but they are THE MOST popular on the net. he's a former ati coder or something. anyways, I used his nvidia drivers for a couple years until he quit doing nvidia. now he's exclusively doing ATI stuff. anyways, instead of getting super crazy with modding the drivers, he just mainly goes for compatibility and bug fixing. and generally garners slightly better performance because of it.

if you are using nvidia your only easy option is to get the tweaksRus xtremeG drivers. they pre-convert the regular desktop drivers to work with the mobile chipsets.

or you could do the conversion yourself...

[CubaLibre]

Toptube! You are the man I need to be talking to.

I forgot to tell everyone my crazy video driver story. Obviously the first thing I thought when I was having this problem was "update the drivers." I've got a Nvidia 8600M GT. So I go to Nvidia's site, download the proper drivers, and it's all like "these won't work." So I use Nvidia's beta system scan thing, and it's like "we don't support laptop drivers, go to this crazy incomprehensible fucking Chinese site and fend for yourself." Nothing on this Chinese site looks anything like my card.

So if you could point me to these fan-made drivers or whatever I would be most grateful!
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Toptube]

http://www.tweakforce.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=15

[CubaLibre]

You are as a god.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Shapermc]

I use Omega drivers and my laptop went from not being able to run Morrowind to being able to run it awesomely! So, yeah, Omega gets my vote. The only problem is that they stopped supporting my card in updates :(
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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[Toptube]

[BotageL]

For some reason, Half-Life 2 refuses to work on my laptop. Portal and TF2 work just fine. HL2 always crashes, usually giving me an error about being unable to load some model and then also being unable to load error.mdl. No idea why. Using -dxlevel 80 makes all the other Source games work - and Half-Life 2 used to work on this machine - so I dunno what's up.

Oh well!
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[km]

[brillo]

Hey, while everybody's here: I just updated my Audigy 2 ZS sound card drivers and went to the Omega Radeon X800 drivers, and now Steam doesn't seem to want to launch any of my games (I only have HL2+Deathmatch/Lost Coast). It goes through the "preparation to launch ____" thing, then the program pops up briefly in my tray before minimizing itself and then disappearing. Kind of odd considering I was just playing it last night.

Verifying the game cache revealed nothing, but I'm re-downloading the game now to see if that helps. If anybody has any tips that would be awesome.

Turns out my problem was that the drivers were too recent and ATI dropped the ball on Direct3D rendering in the older AGP video cards. Doubt it helps anybody else's scenario but rolling back to the not-quite-new driver helped me.)

[BotageL]

[CubaLibre]