Choppy Gameplay

[Crs110]

Hey Techmonkeys. Going to cut to the chase. I just installed Team Fortess 2 on my desktop PC and the gameplay is extremely choppy. I don't think it's lag because my ping is always below 50.

Here are some of my computer's specs:

Windows XP Home Edition
1.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 Processor
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT Graphics Card (have downloaded latest driver)
1024 MB RAM

The thing is, games that originally ran smoothly are now very choppy. I have a feeling it might be a hardware issue but I'm not sure. The settings on which I play TF2 are at 1024x768 display, with all texture, shading effects set on low. If there's any more information you need, let me know.

Thanks.

[hedges]

Hi there CRS,

It looks like you are just scraping through on the games minimum requirements there, which will be why it plays quite choppily. In case you where wondering the game engine and the graphics engine has had an overhaul since the release of the original Half Life 2 and so takes more to run it.

You can check for yourself by going to http://www.canirunit.com.

Also steam can sometimes cause a bit of a drain on resources, but nothing that a quick end task and restart (of the program, not the computer) can't fix...

I hope I'm wrong about the minimum requirements as it would be a shame to not have another person discover the unbridled fun that can be had during this game. Something that I'm sure a few others on this forum can agree with me on. (I'm looking at you BeerMonster and KiD)

[Crs110]

I just wanted to add that my PC has difficulties shutting down for some reason. Anyways, I'll check out the link when I get home. The reason why I set most of the game video settings on low was because I originally tried to play them on high, but it was unbearably laggy. I thought setting them on low would help but it's pretty much the same. Yeah I've heard great things about TF2 as well, and I can't wait to get it running correctly.

[hedges]

What kind of difficulties is your computer having with shutting down? Is it just taking a ridiculously long time to do so? Do you have to hard reset sometimes?

i know, a few questions, but hopefully the more we ask, the more we learn and then we can fix any issues.

You will probably end up running HijackThis at some point as well, so that our resident experts can see if there are any programs that shouldn't be running on your computer and hogging your resources.

Anyways I have work to do now, but i'll be back later.