Half-Life 2 Forum

Hey everybody,
I just installed crossover games, and got half life 2 episode 2 for it. My questions is regarding in game hiccups. I seem to get a very smooth and nice frame rate when playing the game, but it undergoes frequent hiccups, causing the game to freeze for split seconds and then resume again. It almost seems as if my computer cannot handle the game, but I know I can run it on almost all High with bootcamp, so I am wondering if there are any solutions. My computer is an orignal Macbook Pro with 2 ghz intel core duo, 1 gb ram, and the radeon x1600. I am running pretty much everything on medium and get a great frame rate, minus the hiccups. thanks

Do these only occur if you go forward in the map(ie, normal gameplay), or also if you stay in one place? If they only happen when you go forward, it might be because of the loading of new parts of the map, or compiling new shaders. If the problem occurs when you stay in a confined area of the map, a background application might periodically use the CPU intensively for a short time, or a driver freezes the system shortly.

I can confirm this hiccup and I find its when the game is loading a new scene (eg walking into a courtyard with a firefight).

In this case its most likely due to loading new parts of the map, and/or compiling new shaders. Unfortunately there is little we can do against this. Especially with GLSL shaders(On Linux, to allow dxlevel 90), the shader compilation takes a while. Unfortunately we can't compile shader during loading because we don't know some details until the shader is actually used.

One thing to make sure of: in the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences, turn off "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible". In addition to what Stefan described, the delay may be due to the hard drive needing to spin up.