Windows 7: Source Engine Games Glitched, Stuttering, Crashing

Hi all,

I've just installed Windows 7 and am naturally in the process of restoring all my old games that were installed before the format of Vista.

ALL Source engine based games run glitchy or crash.

HL2, HL:E1, HL2:Lost Coast, HL2MP, CS:S and Dark Messiah:

All the above stutter after loading into a level. If the menu is rendered as in HL2 main menu, it also stutters.

Game pauses, sound skips then back to normal for 2-3 seconds. Walls turn invisible and then back, textures flicker and turn to multicoloured patterns. The screen also flickers black.

L4D:



As soon as the level loads, 2-3 seconds of sound and black screen then looping sound and crash. Have to C-A-D to desktop and close.

VERY IRRITATING! All other games from Steam (well, UT3 and anything non-Source) run perfect as well as Far Cry 2, Crysis, Dragon Rising.

Tearing my hair out here after reading that x64 Steam/Source games are confirmed working!

Have tried the -dx9 and -32bit command line switches too, as well as disabling Multi CPU on L4D and trying Windowed mode.

GeForce drivers are latest, as are X-Fi and mobo.

Any other people experiencing this?

Hmm... That's kind of odd. I've got all the Orange Box games working, plus Left 4 Dead, Garry's Mod, and Counter Strike: Source.

If someone is not able to provide you with an answer you may need to uninstall and reinstall Steam. Also, make sure that all your steam games have a refresh rate of what your monitor OSD (on screen display) shows.

Rolled back to Forceware 186.18 and that did the trick. My advice, don't use the latest ones!

Ok from what I have been seeing Source games and sound drivers have been a big issue. I would try to uninstall the sounds drivers reboot and install again. Then reboot and rerun the DX9 setup and test.

Same thing was happening to me, i would be playing tf2 or css and i would get a random micro stutter for about a second this would happen anywhere from 10 to 20 mins of playing, nothing to constant. i narrowed it down to being my caviar green 1tb. So i went out and bought a caviar black 1tb and that seemed to be the problem, but now today after hours of playing the last week or so since i got the hard drive, it did it once. now idk if that was the server or if it was just me or my internet connection. i had asked the people in the server if they had just lagged right there for a second and everyone said no. I still have the caviar green in my computer ( i am now using it for storage) but over all i think it was my hard drive that was causing it. I will see if this continues to happen again since this has happen tonight, and if it does continue to happen its back to the drawing board.

that's terrribly normal since Win 7 although built upon the same core as Vista, they'd changed a lot with simpler source code and programming. Games are almost expected to not work for a lot of systems. Your options are either to wait for new patches/updates or dual booting XP/Vista. Compatibility mode totally sucked for me but u can give it a try if u've the time. Good luck!

IDK what you are talking about slick530, I have been using windows 7 since beta with no problems with my steam games. Im starting to see a pattern, that a lot of the strange issue arise from doing an upgrade from Vista/XP to Windows 7 seems something is being left behind in the registry.
Here is what I can say if you are using a Nvidia card try using an older driver verison. If its an ATI card try the newest pack 9.1 works better then the others Ive used.

i have the 186 drivers for my nvidia card. i know the 19x drivers have problems, my only concern was if i know its 7 giving it the problem im fine with it, its just in the back of my mind it might be some of my hardware and that's whats killing me.