Audio Problems

L

Lemartes

Guest
My audio is very studdery and buggy it seems like, performance wise its fine. Anyone having this problem, I have it with CS sometimes too, whats going on?
 
same here, smooth except when certain sounds load.
P4 2.4
9800 pro
768 ddr 2100
onboard sound
 
same here

SB 128 PCI with accelerated drivers (non-microsoft)
 
Yep same here (with Audigy 2)

The actual fps is nice and smooth but when a Combine start shooting or similar it stutters like mad.

Still bloody fantastic so far though!!!
 
Try setting sound to 4 speakers, that should help in some cases
 
Shadow-warrior said:
Yep same here (with Audigy 2)
Click to expand...
same card, same problem..

first time i noticed it in CS:S, de_aztec near defuse area: chopping sound and framerate drop

:(
 
Can anyone please help as this is ruining the game.


Bump
 
Im getting this problem too. The sound skips, and pops and loops which causes the video to lag.

I have an X800XTPE, 74gig Raptor, 1gig OCZ RAM and a 3400+ + Audigy 2.

No idea at this point..the game is really stuttery.

:(
 
Was just about the make a thread about this too..using nforce SoundStorm....Anyone have any solutions? bug in game?
 
I have a similar problem, but it seems to be memory related, and its not to much of a problem for me.

Try rebooting, and removing a load of the crap thats running behind windows, to free up some RAM.
 
Tried using various audigy2 drivers - makes no difference. Reloading the current level seems to help a bit.
 
Sounds like the exact same issue as with Doom3.

The solution there was to first :

A) Check if your harddrive is running in PIO mode - this slows down everything and makes it choppy. If it is, change it to DMA mode in your settings.

try that. If still no good, then:

B) Switch off write cache on your harddrive, this should stop sounds looping/repeating/stuttering but is only a temporary fix.

g'luck
 
If your HD LED is going berzerk when everything goes stuttery it is your harddrive.

Did you try the harddrive test I posted?
 
I've got a solution to the stuttering. The problem is related to the fact that the HL2 engine is crap when it comes to sounds, ie it doesn't precache sounds into memory, when a sound is first played it will read from disk and then it is cached in memory for further use. The other problem is the games syncs with the sound, so for the dialog of characters it will pause the game while the sound is being loaded into memory and then played. So that's why your HD looks like it's accessing all the time and the game stutters all the damn time.

A fix....
Luckily HL2 has an async option for the audio. to enable it you need to add these config entries to you autoexec.cfg file.

snd_async_fullyasync 1

these other options help too.

snd_mixahead "0.5"
sv_forcepreload "1"

This should fix your game stuttering all the time when it loads new speech and effects. One side effect of this though is since it's async sound, if your hd doesn't load it quick enough the sound will lag to the onscreen action, so make sure you defrag you hd too. Generally i've found this works really good and the gameplay is ultra smooth because of it. The lip sync is still pretty decent too. Hope this helps.
 
yeah sounds like a memory leak
excuse the pun

btw im getting the same prob
 
Noemoz i just tried that and while it did address many of my sound stutter moments it didnt completely solve the problem.

Hmm..anything else we could try?
 
neomoz said:
I've got a solution to the stuttering. The problem is related to the fact that the HL2 engine is crap when it comes to sounds, ie it doesn't precache sounds into memory, when a sound is first played it will read from disk and then it is cached in memory for further use. The other problem is the games syncs with the sound, so for the dialog of characters it will pause the game while the sound is being loaded into memory and then played. So that's why your HD looks like it's accessing all the time and the game stutters all the damn time.

A fix....
Luckily HL2 has an async option for the audio. to enable it you need to add these config entries to you autoexec.cfg file.

snd_async_fullyasync 1

these other options help too.

snd_mixahead "0.5"
sv_forcepreload "1"

This should fix your game stuttering all the time when it loads new speech and effects. One side effect of this though is since it's async sound, if your hd doesn't load it quick enough the sound will lag to the onscreen action, so make sure you defrag you hd too. Generally i've found this works really good and the gameplay is ultra smooth because of it. The lip sync is still pretty decent too. Hope this helps.
Click to expand...
What exactly does async do? Wish you could just make it precache the sounds.
 
Tried those changes, unfortunately it doesn't help much.

Really shitty this - incredible game, graphics run very smooth but the sound is struggling hard.
 
Definately not my harddrive as I got a 10000rpm Western Digital Raptor drive.
 
Doesn't matter if it's nuclear powered, if it's set to PIO mode it will crawl like a slug
 
CR0M said:
Doesn't matter if it's nuclear powered, if it's set to PIO mode it will crawl like a slug
Click to expand...


what exactly is pio mode, and how do u go about changing it?
 
jrob8604 said:
what exactly is pio mode, and how do u go about changing it?
Click to expand...

PIO mode is an inefficient windows setting for harddrive data transfer/ caching. Windows defaults to this if it detects errors on the drive. This slows down everything including sound and texture caching in games making them choppy.

What it SHOULD be set to is DMA (or Ultra DMA) if it isn't already.

Just go into your harddrive properties, see if it's running in PIO mode, change it to DMA if it is. Things will run a lot smoother.
 
I don't have those problems, I think.

I may look to see if I really got those...though.

Got an Audigy 2 here.
 
i dont think you can change the transfer mode on a SATA drive which is what the raptor is. (i may be mistaken however).

Seriously i doubt this has anything to do with disk caching. BTW..Turning Catalyst AI to normal seems to make thinsg a bit better but ultimately the problem is still there and im sure its some incompatability somewhere.

man what a shitty day..technical issues. I just wanted to play HL2!
 
Just wanted to add I have the same sound stuttering problems, and I'm using Soundstorm. My PC is a decent rig, and ran Doom 3 quite smoothly. So the stuttering in HL2 isn't because my PC isn't good enough. I've checked everything, and all my configuration settings are optimal. I make sure to kill all unnecessary background processes as well.

I don't think this is a configuration problem . . . it's a bug in the game.
 
I don't even think it's a bug. I think it's just the way the game was designed. My gameplay is butter smooth though I do get occasional stuttering when lots of sounds are loading/playing at once, but I haven't found it objectionable.

I might try the tweaks when I get home, but I'd rather the occasional stutter than the sound being out of sync.
 
Well my game is stuttering almost continually. I've set the texture resolution and sound to medium. I've added those command lines - but the problem is still there.
 
Mountain Man said:
I don't even think it's a bug. I think it's just the way the game was designed.
Click to expand...


If its the way the game was designed then Valve are in deep poo!
 
i have nForce 2 deluxe board and don't get studdering, but instead i get what i can only call low-end clipping. When the bass kicks in, it sometimes changes from bass to really terrible static...i can play for a while and have nothing happen at all...if there is a really big explosion, it's almost like the bass has blown out my speakers...it only happens in :Source games, and oddly enough, Day of Defeat. If I quit and restart steam, it will usually fix, but not always...and the worst part is, once it has decided to start doing the static/crackle/broken speaker sound, it continues no matter what I do with the sound system.

I tried using the Nforce control panel's EQ to eliminate the low-frequency sound, but cutting everything under 200hz didn't help at all...I didn't care so much when it happened in DoD because I would just wait till the end of the round and restart steam...same thing in CS:S...but in HL2 single player, well...what the hell?
 
Pallaris said:
i dont think you can change the transfer mode on a SATA drive which is what the raptor is. (i may be mistaken however).

Seriously i doubt this has anything to do with disk caching. BTW..Turning Catalyst AI to normal seems to make thinsg a bit better but ultimately the problem is still there and im sure its some incompatability somewhere.

man what a shitty day..technical issues. I just wanted to play HL2!
Click to expand...
Exactly what I was going to say.
 
With CSS i had to set my sound to 2 speakers or headphone. 5.1 sound stutters very bad. I have a sblive digital (from dell). Seems hl2 had the same problem + when i set it to headphones the sound is good but when the hd loads it stutters :( Gonna try the tips mentioned here. Another thing i try is to disable hardware acceleration of sound in dxdiag.
 
benpatient, check out the new nforce drivers on nvidia's site.

If that doesn't work, then try downloading the Realtek audio drivers, they don't have a nice interface, but they tend to work better.
 
I set the sound quality to low, this greatly reduced the stuttering. Seems like the hi-quality sounds require a lot of RAM. the game still sounds terrific on my 5.1 system, though

ckeck this out if you did not already
 
I have the same problem in CS:S and now in HL2 with stuttering caused by sounds..

A64 3800+
X800XT PE
1024MB Corsair Ram
Audigy 2 ZS
 
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