All games experience sound hickups in Vista Ultimate X32?

[Patrick]

Hi All,

I've got a DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra-D board, an AMD FX60 cpu, 4GB of RAM and
the onboard sound module (realtek) and an XFX 7900GT Extreme.

Whatever games I play, Halflife-2, Halflife-2 Episode One, Fear, Fear
Extraction point, NFS Carbon, etc etc.
I experience sound hickups.

I've tried the NForce4 Vista beta drivers, the NForce4 XP drivers (6.86) and
the remix driver kits. Finally I;ve tried the Realtek audio drivers which do
seem to have a better audio quality but the hichups remain. The hickups only
occue in games.

I have no real complaint about the speed of the video handling of games in
Vista. I run at 1280x1024 and all games I run do this resolution very smooth
on my system with Vista.

I've tried several builds of videodrivers to see it that influences the
sound hickups but it doesn't. Right now I'm using 100.54.

Lack of RAM and/or CPU power can't be the problem

Can anyone help?

Patrick

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

I don't have any sound hiccups, but I'm using an X-FI card versus the
onboard. which would beg to question, with your rig, why would you use
on-board sound over a sound blaster card ?

 

[Guest]

I guess your best bet would be to try an add-on soundcard (borrow from a
friend) and see if you have the same issues. Although that may be
frustrating, you will at least know if it's a specific issue with your
on-board sound.

I have a few odd issues on my version of Vista Ultimate, the biggest ones
being related to my 8800 GTS and Nvidia's ropey drivers for Vista launch. I
have an X-Fi card and no issues with sound at present, although I have only
played media files and Counter-Strike: Source. I'm tempted to try my onboard
sound, so that I can make use of the new sound API in Vista (seeing as the
old HAL thing which helped Soundblaster products has been removed in
DX10...which means I can now only get best sound when OpenAL is implemented
into a game) - but then I'm planning a motherboard upgrade soon, so I may
just wait.

 

[Guest]

The problem most likely lies with the fact taht you are using a non-open al
realtek onboard soundcard. Microsoft ditched Directsound support in Vista
and now requires cards to conform to Open AL in some way. Your card is
basically emulating Open AL, to emulate Directsound. You will most likely
only be able to solve the problem by buying a card that has native Open AL
support.

 

[Patrick]

Anyway,

it appears not to be related to the onboard sound.
Downloading new raid drivers for my nforce4 board fixed the sound stutter in
all games,
ftp://ftp.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Driver/RAID/nVIDIA/RAIDnVDIA116_Vista.zip
did the trick (version 9.30)

Patrick