Slowness after quiting HL2 based games...

OzZie · 14 Mar 2006 at 12:18

I've recently been getting a wierd problem with all HL2 engine based games. Basically, the game loads up as per normal, and i join servers etc and play for a while. However, when i quit the server, the mouse goes very slow in responding to my actions, and also the sound is not in sync when i hover the mouse over "Create Server" or "Join Server". Even when i quit the game, it takes a good 30 secs before it goes back to the desktop. ;o

So far i have tried three different catalyst drivers (5.12, 6.1, and 6.2) and updated my VIA drivers to no avail. Even a format hasnt seemed to cure the problem.

Because i have a seperate partition for my games, i'm thinking maybe the cfg files are corrupt after i reformat the C: drive on the games drive?

Any help is appreciated.

ethos · 14 Mar 2006 at 12:32

How much ram do you have?

ScarySquirrel · 14 Mar 2006 at 12:37

ethos said:
How much ram do you have?

When i quit, i just open up the console and type quit, or just hit F10 if playing CSS, thats quicker. But as the last guy said could be down to RAM, when i went from 512 to 1gb, then to 2gb i noticed games loading, quitting etc all a lot quicker

Blackstar_solar · 14 Mar 2006 at 12:51

OzZie said:
i'm thinking maybe the cfg files are corrupt after i reformat the C: drive on the games drive?

Go for a fresh download of steam etc (or install off cd) but fresh everything steam related

DaveyD · 14 Mar 2006 at 13:02

Validate all your Steam games.

Only as a last resort, of you have a super-fast internet connection re-install Steam from scratch.

Defiled · 14 Mar 2006 at 13:28

You are defo running out of memory be it because either you need more physical ram or because one of the programs on your system (not nessasarily HL2 itself) has a memory leak.

OzZie · 14 Mar 2006 at 13:51

Memory should'nt be a problem as i've got 1GB of RAM and i've never had the problem before. Timings are 2.5-3-3-6 which isnt too bad.

This is on a fresh install of XP, so i don't think im running low on resources.

I'll try validating my files later on

Defiled · 14 Mar 2006 at 14:01

Just as you quit HL2, try and have a look at task manager - specifically performance tab -> available physical memory and also check under the processes tab -> order by mem usage -> see how much memory the top few processes are using.

Of course, the above will be hard when HL2 takes so long to exit, so you might try running Task Manager at the same time as HL2, and when you finally manage to quit, check how high the yellow graph got under the performance tab.

james.miller · 14 Mar 2006 at 14:05

same problem here.its like im running 256mb of ram and not 1gb. It gets progressively worse the longer i've been playing it though, which would suggest a memory leak maybe

gord · 14 Mar 2006 at 15:08

james.miller said:
same problem here.its like im running 256mb of ram and not 1gb. It gets progressively worse the longer i've been playing it though, which would suggest a memory leak maybe

Aye, the source engine has had memory problems.

Best thing, check your processes before/afterwards, see if theres anything strange you dont recognise... and see if its reporting youve got no free memory left...