You got lagged or you alt-tabbed out of game and you got a visual problems?
There is a fix for misplaced items, players holding wrong weapons, invisible players, missing cart indicator and wrong team colour models(Blue medic with red needle gun)

Go with this command, for instant non-bugged lulz.

bind "home" "record fix; stop"

All credits goes to lulz

(Haven't tested it myself, so dunno if it actually works )

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motherfuckin rabbits ejaculating sunshine

No, all credit actually goes to the guy who found the solution first since I've been using that fix long before AciD posted anything. :-P

But yes, it works, and I tried to spread the solution on the SpA servers - even last night on pl_goldrush. ^^

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Edited for your pleasure.

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motherfuckin rabbits ejaculating sunshine

Easiest way ive found with any bug in TF2 caused by alt-tab is adding this to the lauch options.

-sw -noborder

places TF2 in a window but -noborder removed the edges so it looks normal.

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"Destiny finds those who listen, fate finds the rest"

Only playing in windowed mode decreases performance (the impact might be bigger or smaller but it will be there) since the OS (especially Vista!) has various mechanisms that boost foreground processes if they run in full-screen Direct3D mode. One simple example: Aero (and various components of the Vista window manager) is unloaded each time you go into a fulscreen D3D.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I noticed no drop in FPS i even checked within fraps surely you can just set the priority higher for HL2.exe if you expereince any problems?

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"Destiny finds those who listen, fate finds the rest"

FRAPS is very bad for benchmarking - it's good for making screenshots and semi-good for recording videos - to check FPS you better run either the old CS:S video stress test though its results are a bit bogus since the game is hitting the engine FPS limit or the newer Lost Coast stress test (of course it's still not as graphically demanding as TF2). To simply show FPS in-game you are better off by using the net_graph or cl_showfps console commands.

Proof:
Full screen, max settings, 202.49 FPS
Windowed, max settings, 155.15 FPS
(All non-vital programs turned off and memory cleaned)

I'd rather bind one key to the commands Weirdo mentioned than have a 25% FPS decrease. ;-)

Setting the process priority doesn't do much since your RAM is still occupied by components that haven't been unloaded and the task scheduler, not to mention the video card drivers, have still to cope with multitasking. There's a reason why alt-tabbing takes so long and causes all these problems - it's because the OS has to switch between two different performance modes. There's no magic solution to this, especially not windowed mode. =)

Of course it all depends on your hardware - if you have the newest Quad Core processor with 8 GB RAM and some next-gen ATI/NVIDIA cards running in Crossfire/SLI mode then you can pretty much ignore this. If, however, you have a computer that, although it was state of the art once, slowly approaches the 2 year barrier (my cycle for buying new hardware) then these things matter. =)

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I see ill give it a try

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"Destiny finds those who listen, fate finds the rest"

By the way - I also ran the benchmark with HL2 set to the highest priority (realtime) although I was pretty much aware that it wouldn't do anything - I like to be thorough and check what people are saying. ^^

Result: 155.66 FPS (basically within the normal benchmark variance)

Don't get me wrong - I search for various tweaks etc. all the time but I like to approach them with skepticism...

The only REALLY magical performance fix for TF2 is mat_queue_mode 2 I described in great detail elsewhere but it has its share of "magical" problems as well like causing magical crashes and causing the game to eat up magical amounts of RAM. ;-)

To get some real-life results I downloaded two TF2 benchmark demos that you will be able to run yourself to prove or disprove my claims. =)

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

OK - here are some benchmarks that actually MIGHT interest you since they concern TF2. ^^

There are two benchmark demos I ran (thanks to WaLLy3K):

                windowed   fullscreen
average.dem     68.48      78.21
firefight.dem   24.82      28.56

The test procedure is the following and you should follow it if the results are to have any meaning:

1. Download the demos here
TF2StressTest.zip (2.0 MB)

2. Extract them to your main tf directory (steamapps\account@something.com\team fortress 2\tf)

3. Disable all non vital processes - by that I mean those pesky apps sitting in your tray icon as well. You might want to download the awesome Process Explorer for that (it's written by a guy who's working at Microsoft now and was very famous for his in-depth Windows knowledge) - I use it as a permanent Task Manager replacement:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96653.aspx

4. Run TF2 with the launch parameters -sw -noborder for the first set of tests (right-click, properties, set launch options).

5. Log off in Friends. Contrary to popular belief the Steam overlay does NOT affect your performance as long as it's inactive (it only resides in your RAM and takes up a bit of memory) but it WILL affect them if you get e.g. a sliding notification during the test.

6. Open the console and type in the following commands:

fps_max 500 (I have them locked at 76 even when using VSYNC =)
mat_vsync 0 (should you have turned it on - and you should for normal gameplay)
timedemo average

7. DO NOT note down the results of the first run - run the demo again. This will make sure that you don't have any object loading stutters affecting the results and so on.

8. Run timedemo firefight using the same procedure.

9. Change the launch parameters to -fullscreen (delete -noborder) and repeat the test procedure - you COULD set fullscreen etc. in-game but only suckers use GUIs to set these things (this is as much true for TF2 as it is for Linux :-P) especially since there could be some problems when switching from windowed to fullscreen (the image was displaced in my case).

Marvel at the 14%-15% drop in performance...

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

But there are games which can alt-tab better than others and TF2 is sadly one of the latter. It's even the worst alt-tabber I played in the last half year. :/

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SaintK: I'm completely lost

Well, that is true - it gets even worse when you think about the fact that HL1 is/was almost just as bad. The main thing with these games is that they PRETEND to be good alt-tabbers because they let you switch TO another application quite easily but the horror begins when you are trying to switch back which takes hours and usually ends up with a crash or some glitch...

P.S. Blackhawk - I'm starting to get slightly annoyed by your "bla bla bla" quotations - I might be writing long posts but in no way are they meaningless babbling (unlike my short posts ^^).

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I meant with good alt-tabbers these where you can tab in and out.

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SaintK: I'm completely lost

I know, I know - I completely agree with you. I think you misunderstood "these games" - I meant HL1 and HL2 by that (I don't like to use the same expressions close to each other for stylistic reasons ^^). That is, HL1 and HL2 PRETEND to be good alt-tabbers (without actually being good =) because they trick you into alt-tabbing out (which is pretty easy and painless) but then start causing immense problems on switching back. :-D

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I bet that fat owner of valve laughs his ass of every time we alt-tab back in game.

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motherfuckin rabbits ejaculating sunshine