Half-Life 2 Problems

[thatmariolover]

Alright. I'm having some major issues with HL2. Namely, it's the same stuttering bug that many people have been having for a long time. However, I'm confused, because it says on most HL2 news pages that a patch was released to fix the problem (the problem being the fact that the game is loading textures on the fly as opposed to at the beginning of a level - which causes lag if you turn a corner or look somewhere you haven't before).

Anybody have a fix? As far as I can tell, Steam has updated my copy of HL2. The only temporary fix I've gotten so far is to control-alt-delete out of the program and set the task priority to "Below Normal." Don't know why it works, but it does for about an hour.

Thanks.