Audio Problems with HL2

It would appear to be that I, along with many other people are having Audio problems with HL2. Only after 4 hours I have been able to track down a bunch of people who seem to be having a similar issue.

While playing whenever you turn around a corner and there is a new sound or somebody new starts talking or you come into a room and a gun is shot, the game will pause for a second as if it has to take a second to load the sound file off of the HD. This make no sense to me why this should be happening unless I didn't have enough RAM, but I was under the assumption that 1GB would be enough to play this game.

Here are my system specs:
Athlon XP 2.5GHz
1GB RAM
80GB SATA HD
nForce 2 mobo w/ SoundStorm audio
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

It would help if other people having the same problem could state their problem and the specs of their computers. Hopefully someone from Valve will see this.

Ok so im getting the audio problems too. Now if i was a nobody i would have assumed like everyone else ur audio problems were due to a ****house onboard sound card (no offence)... But why do i get the same thing when i got an Audigy 2?!?!?!?!?!

Hmm... Why oh why is hl2 bugged to the max?

Back to WOW for me...

I think that I may have found somewhat of a fix, now I've been playing for 5.5 hours and I'm etremely tired so I'll have to get back to this later. I think that by turning off my McAfee Anti-virus though the problem went away. I also defragged about a quarter of my HD and then got bored of waiting. I'm going to pass out now even though I'm high on Rockstar .

BTW, for anyone who has no experience with nVidia SoundStorm onboard audio, it's actually very nice I and prefer it over Audigy because I play my computer games on my Home Theater and it really makes it nice because it encodes all the audio into dolby digital which can be ran over a single Coaxial S/PDIF connection to the receiver which makes for great surround sound with EAX and other 3D sound formats.

The problem may still be there because the area of the game I was playing was pretty small once I loaded it back up, I'm just too tired to keep playing. See you guys on the flipside.

[Shadow-warrior]

Same problem here - anything like a new sound or someone starts shooting and the stutter to 1 frame per second for a few seconds then bounce straight back to 30-50

Audigy 2 here with latest drivers

I've the same problem, and yes it only happens when you turn the corner into a bigger area. Since the game's loading resources on the fly (afaik), when you get to a new area there's so much stuff its preloading that it makes the game and sound stutter for a second.

Audigy here.

i also have the same problem

i dont have a high end sound card, but like many others with high end cards it seems to be having the same problem.. I encounter most of the chopiness at the beginning of the game when there was a scripted event like every second. I kinda messed with my video settings and noticed if the testure detail was turned down to medium that it wouldn't be as bad, but it still happened some times.. I can run everything high and i will get smooth fps but for some reason when ever i land on like 5 crates and they smash i seem to lag.

I got a 9800 pro

Originally Posted by SpeedDemon

I think that I may have found somewhat of a fix, now I've been playing for 5.5 hours and I'm etremely tired so I'll have to get back to this later. I think that by turning off my McAfee Anti-virus though the problem went away. I also defragged about a quarter of my HD and then got bored of waiting.

Thanks for the info. I'll turn off my anti-virus software (after disconecting, of course) and defrag when I get home from work.

I'm starting to think that the working day will never end though

I don't think that it has anything to do with Video settings. I tried turning my video settings way down and it didn't do anything to fix the problem for me earlier when I was first experimenting with it. I even tried messing with the SQ settings and that didn't change it either. I think that there is some bug in how it's loading sounds, hopefully Valve can fix this extremely annoying bug quickly. I shouldn't have to disable my Anti-virus just to play a game, I don't have to do it with any of my other games so there is no excuse why I should have to do it with HL2.

its quite anoying... when i got in tha warp machine at the beginning it stuttared quit a bit. I hope valve fixes this and it isn't a hardware issue. Im thinking bout getting more ram so i dont have to deal with these long load times

Do you think that more ram would really help anything though. I have 1GB of RAM and load times still suck. I think the only thing that would really help load times would be getting a 10,000RPM SATA WD Raptor HD or a 15,000RPM SCSI HD. The 15,000RPM is obviously going to make a huge difference but you definitely pay for the performance.

i also have these stutters. i never used to have them when i played cs source but suddenly got them after updating my radeon drivers, i think they are the problem

on another forum it seems everyone with an audigy2 is having thse problems, and that having an uber fast hard drive makes no difference at all.

[Defiler]

When I had 512MB of RAM DOOM3 did this to me. WHen I got 1Gig it cleared it up. I'm sure it's a glitch and Valve will fix it.

I sure as hell hope they do, It happens to me in CS:S, too

Its easy to fix but the solution is always a poor one.. You have to go into your audio slider dx bar and bring it all the way down to no hardware acceleration.. Creative devices have sucked for years.. I own an audigy 2... This should be happening for you in all fps that have large texutres.. for me it even happens in cs some times when I shoot a window then immediatley jump through it to break it. (This only happens in office becuase of the shattering glass.) The only solution may be to either buy another gig of ram or get another sound card..(Im not even sure the extra gig would help.) If you notice sometimes the xbox even has this problem... Anyone have a real solution?