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I used to play TF2 on a shitty laptop, and even though it was playable it would very often stutter, with the still image and the looping chunk of last-played audio. Perhaps it’s just me noticing it more in those moments, but it really did seem to happen more often when someone would get close to me, when pyros were around, around dispensers and at the end of the round when every winner gets their crits buff, so I suspected it was because of particle effects paired with my abysmal machine.

Now I have a new PC, every game I could barely run on my laptop runs more than fine, including TF2, and yet this problem won’t go away, nor did it get better or worse. Every once in a while, it will just have this kind of hiccup, or massive FPS drop, no idea what it is.

The only thing I carried over from my old laptop was my autoexec.cfg, and that’s pretty much just chrisconfig with some keybinds and one or two custom commands I tried to improve framerate but didn’t do much, nor did removing them solve anything.

It’s really frustrating, it made me lose games and I don’t know what to do. Anyone care to help? I know jackshit about this technical stuff.

Here’s specs and my autoexec (the only custom stuff is the stuff at the beginning, under “Good connection”, unless I forgot something).

Ah, almost forgot: I also have this weird sound problem, sometimes a random sound, it can be any in-game sound, will play with a one or two seconds delay. I will hear everything else just fine but, for instance, I will hit the key for a voice command and it will play a couple of seconds later for me, but at the right time for everyone else, or sometimes I’d die and the death scream and everything will play, but the sound of the weapon that killed me will only play during/after that. Had this problem since I started playing on the new PC.

Quoted from doks

Set your config.cfg to read only. You can find the file in tf/cfg if im not mistaken. [this is just a general tip, not gonna fix your problems problablly.]

what have you tried to fix so far ?

reinstal tf2, update sound and video drivers, try the game without your autoexec, just in-game settings on low. What launch options do you use ? Did you remove -dxlevel after first time ?

Haven’t really tried to fix anything other than trying to remove my custom stuff from the autoexec and leaving the Chris Config only.

As for reinstall tf2, reinstalling it on another computer should count, since it’s what I did, and you can see it didn’t do much.

I think I actually forgot to remove -dxlevel after the first time, but I did remove it eventually. The rest of the launch options are written in my autoexec, commented after “Good Connection”, put them there in case you wanted to know.

Quoted from damneasy

I still dont know why you have to remove -dxlevel? Can someone explain

Game loads faster for me if I have it removed.

I’m not sure what resets and what doesn’t by removing stuff in autoexec, but I wiped it minus the keybinds and mouse options and the problem is still there.

Once again I suspect it has something to do with particles, I was in arena against a guy using the Pomson, while testing (6 players total on the server).

I updated my gpu drivers and nothing has changed.

I also tried to set the dxlevel at 90 (I think I had it at 80 or 85) in case the problem was the config being suited for higher dxlevels, but of course it didn’t solve the issue. (I still need dxlevel 90 for a mod I’m trying to install, so I’m keeping it, this is not a general low fps issue anyway).

Quoted from Bona

There really is no reason to not leave in -dxlevel in you launch options, if your TF2 starts acting weird when you do it however it is related to your drivers most likely, or a wrong setup in your GPU settings.

Leaving -dxlevel in options causes longer start-up time and delayed alt-tab in fullscreen mode.

I have solved this issue.

I started to think it had to do with sound rather than particles, because it seemed to happen more often at the beginning of some sounds (especially voice commands).

I didn’t know how to test the game without sound, because I’m pretty sure lowering the volume to 0 still actually plays the sounds, but at 0 volume, so I had no idea what to do.

Today I read about someone having a completely unrelated issue that he solved by deleting all sound.cache files. I tried that just to see if something changed, and I have no more hiccups at all.

Alright, apparently I spoke too soon.

I don’t think it was a coincidence, because the game had 0 hiccups the whole time after I deleted the sound caches, but today the problem is back. Obviously I know the game creates cache files at every startup, so I thought maybe the problem has to do with pre-existing caches no matter what and I’d have to delete them all the time, but I tried doing it again and it won’t fix it anymore.

At this point I’m not sure of anything anymore.