Stuttering/Pauses in gameplay...

[Poparelli]

Ok, having some problems with stuttering. It only happens when opening a door or coming around a corner to a new area, and very rarely when switching weapons. The game just locks up entirely for a second and then everything goes back to normal.

I usually run on High, 800x600 with 4x AA. I'm not sure what my fps is, but I don't notice any slowdown other than those pauses.

Just to check things out, I put it on Ultra, 1024x768 with 4x AA, and ran 3 timedemos in a row (demo1).

Results:

1st - 13fps
2nd - 26fps
3rd - 27fps

Note that on the first timedemo it was doing the pauses around every corner and from the 2nd time on they disappeared.

Since I only run on High and not Ultra usually, I'm obviously not lacking in fps so what could be causing these annoying pauses? I'm thinking it might be lack of RAM....??

My setup:

AMD Sempron 2800+
WinXP Pro SP1
512MB DDR
80GB Maxtor
Radeon X800XL on 8x AGP with latest drivers
Can't remember my motherboard exactly but I think it's Asus Av7-400 or something close to that.

Thanks.

[M姧åç}{è®]

how long since u last defragged? those pauses could be caused by ur HDD trying to access sectors, which could be fragmented all over the place.
also what size cache does ur HDD have?

running on Ultra, u need a 512MB graphics card to get optimal results.

[The Undertaker]

This is normal behavior. The data is stored in a compressed format so it takes so work to access the 1st time. Unpakking the pak4 files should remedy this. And running on Ultra will likely cause texture swapping (textures will have to be read out of system memory which is much slower).