Half-Life 2 Stuttering Problems

[Tom the First]

Okay, ever since I upgraded to a Geforce 6600 GT 128 and 1256 mb of RAM, Half-Life 2 and its counter-parts have been stuttering a lot for me. HL2 is the worst stutterer. It stutters every 10 seconds or so, and it makes the game unplayable. I have almost all high settings on with no anti-aliasing and no anisotropic filtering on a 1078 x 768 resolution. On CSS and DOD:S, it doesn't stutter as much, but enough to affect my gameplay performance. I think this problem only concerns the Source engine, because BF2 almost runs seamlessly.
Any ideas? I know this complaint has flooded many HL2 forums, but I am hoping to get a direct opinion.

[eswat]

I know someone who had stuttering problems with the same card model, but with BF2. He never got it fixed. All I can suggest is trying a 3rd party driver and see if it fixes it (as long as you don't choose any softmod/overclocking settings while installing it should work like an official driver), http://www.driverheaven.net/~dhzer0point

[Octocamo]

Yeah, Try Omega drivers.

[Kaptain0wnage]

Doesnt the game require 512MB of RAM?

Nevermind. I didnt see the 1.

[EvilWall]

Mabye your GPU doesn't have enough memory? Or perhaps something is eating system resources?

[C0lin]

I have a 6600 GT and a little bit more memory, but even when I only had 512, the stuttering wasn't making it unplayable. Did you try it on lower settings? You might just try reinstalling the game.

[Tom the First]

All right. I'm going to be trying some different setupds to try to diagnose the problem, but I have marching band all tomorrow, and then I leave for DC for two days on sunday. I do have Norton Systemworks. It might have been running in the background. Fucking thing won't let me kill it.

[Emptythought]

wasnt there a patch on steampowered for this a while back?

did they take it down?