Periodic freezes in TF2

[Plinko]

Lately, every time I play TF2, the game freezes for 15-30 seconds at a time out of the blue. It seems to happen every 5-10 minutes. I hear a kind of bubbling sound and then the game is normal again.

For a while, after a freeze episode a player would often become completely invisible to me, if it happened a couple of times in a session I'd have to reconnect because there were too many invisible players.

I recently upgraded to the newer Nvidia beta drivers hoping it was a rendering issue, but that only seems to have reduced the instances of players disappearing for me.

Any ideas?

[MateoTheBold!]

Are you running 64bit windows with a dedicated sound and sound output to more then 2.1 speakers? A friend of mine had a problem similar to yours and fixed it by switching his sound mode to stereo. Some of the mumbo-jumbo as to why is below:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... 66&page=11

[OldMan]

Plinko, I got almost that exact same thing with my old Nvidia card. The chip would overheat and my game would freeze, then that bubbling noise and the game would be back. Most of the time it came back with odd video glitches and artifacts all over the screen. If you alt-tab out of TF2 and then back in, does the invisible player re-appear? That is what worked for me when this happened it also removed the odd video artifacts. I tried different drivers, I did switch to stereo mode also. Both of those fixes didn't work for me. Mine was totally heat related to the video chip on my nvidia card. Once I got the card cooled down, no more issues. I installed two extra fans just for the video card and that did the trick. At the time I was running Windows XP.

[Plinko]

I use headphones and have the sound set, and it could be a heat issue but I don't get the freezing in other games that I've noticed. I'll clean the airways out and make sure the fans are all OK.

[OldMan]

Heya Plinko, I didn't get the freezing in other games either! I could work/play all day in any number of other programs/games, but when TF2 started, wham, freeze issues and graphics issues. I still have that XP machine running and haven't had any more issues with it and TF2 since cooling the card.

[MateoTheBold!]

Maybe use this to tell if you GPU is overheating?

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

I used the used the CPU version (alt tabbing out of tf2 after a good 15 min in game) to determine my CPU was overheating.

[Inner]

FWIW, I too get these freezes. Hmm. Maybe it's time to clean out the PC.

[Plinko]

Going through that massive SPUF thread, I found a recommendation to add the command: "snd_async_fullyasync 1" to my autoexec.cfg. It turns off the requirement that the individual sound and video frames wait for each other to render and move on to the next one (note: explanation may be garbled). It seems to be working for me so far. I also turned off thread optimization from the nvidia control panel but I may turn that back on to ensure it's not one or the other.

[Dirty Dan]

Ditto overheating. I'm not sure if it was my card or overheating but I upgraded my video card and case and got better performance in both areas, in addition to the freezing never happening since then.

I think in my case it was the heat and/or a bug with my card that was never addressed (since when it was running TF2 my frames were good).