Half-Life 2, Source Engine and Source Dedicated Server updates are available and will be applied automatically when Steam is restarted. The changes include:

Source Engine

• Improved the performance of writing out save games. This will reduce the pause when you pass over an autosave trigger in Half-Life 2, or when you press the quicksave button


• Improved the performance of writing out the thumbnail image for save games. This will also reduce the pause when passing over an autosave trigger or pressing the quicksave button


• Increased cache memory usage for machines that have greater than 512MB of physical memory. This will reduce hitching due to cache thrashing.


• Optimized the sound cache manager, which will reduce hitching as a result of sound cache thrashing


• Minor optimization to the world renderer and world collision


• Minor optimization to the way that asynchronous sound files are loaded


• Optimized the way that sounds were loaded that are trigged by acting sequences


• Optimization to reduced the number of times model sequences are iterated on per frame

Half-Life 2

• Weapon script files are preloaded at startup, instead of when they are accessed. This will reduce some hitches while playing Half-Life 2

Linux Server

• Added "-pidfile" command line argument to output a pid file on startup