Serious Sam 2 Sound Problems >:E

[R00k]

I bought SS2 the same day as Q4, but haven't bothered installing it until a few days ago. And it's done nothing but irritate me since I loaded it.

I'm having very weird sound issues. Basically, from the very beginning of the game - from the splash screen - all the sounds stutter, and sound like they're trying to play all at once.

I've scoured the internet on this, and come across a few other people that are having the same type of problem, but it doesn't seem like CroTeam is in a hurry to fix this, even though it's a serious problem on perfectly good hardware.

My system:

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
AMD X2 3800 (default speed @ ~2 gHz)
2gb OCZ dual-channel DDR400
7800GT
The nForce chipset, which contains the SoundBlasterLive 24-bit

The sound works beautifully in every other game, with full 5.1 surround.

I have installed the released game patch; updated sound drivers; updated BIOS; installed an AMD X2 driver to fix CPU throttling issues; turned off EAX in-game; turned hardware acceleration to Basic on the sound card; set CPU affinity for the game executable to only run on one CPU.

I have no idea what else to do, and I can't believe CroTeam hasn't even acknowledged this problem, much less announced a fix or workaround.

This should probably be a rant, but I was hopeful that maybe some of you guys would have some ideas, because I am completely out of them.

[shadd_]

i dunno rook seems like you have everything covered.

i know i'm gonna buy an x-fi to replace my audigy1(modded to aud2).

you would see an fps gain as well going to an external card. even with your new bitchin' system.

[Psyche911]

i dunno rook seems like you have everything covered.

i know i'm gonna buy an x-fi to replace my audigy1(modded to aud2).

you would see an fps gain as well going to an external card. even with your new bitchin' system.

His motherboard has Soundblaster Live! built in. It has 3D audio acceleration. The only benefit that would give is an Audigy's benefit over SB Live! which I don't believe is much in terms of CPU usage.

[shadd_]

audigy2zs and x-fi are a pretty good step ahead concerning cpu usage when using eax hardware accel and openAL.

quake4 sounds awesome with 64 channel openAL and surround speakers. but the cpu hit is pretty big on my system with an audigy.

[Psyche911]

audigy2zs and x-fi are a pretty good step ahead concerning cpu usage when using eax hardware accel and openAL.

quake4 sounds awesome with 64 channel openAL and surround speakers. but the cpu hit is pretty big on my system with an audigy.

According to this review, the maximum difference between Audigy 1 and Audigy 2 is .6% CPU usage in games.

And this review between the Live! 5.1 and Audigy 1 shows no tangible performance difference either.

It may have better sound quality (I don't know), but performance doesn't seem to vary as much as 1% between any of them.

I normally don't refer to Tom's, but it seemed to be the only site I could quickly find these comparisons on.

[R00k]

I found an old crappy card in a different PC. Playing with crappy, steady sound would be better than high fidelity, unintelligble sound, so I'm gonna see how that does.

[Psyche911]

I found an old crappy card in a different PC. Playing with crappy, steady sound would be better than high fidelity, unintelligble sound, so I'm gonna see how that does.

R00k: I may have found the problem.
What specific PSU do you have?

Is it a 24 pin PSU? If so, does it have a white wire on the 24 pin connector? If you answered no to either of those, that causes sound problems with that motherboard.

Found it in this thread:
http://xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=79282

The white wire signifies a -5 volt line, which you need. Along with a native 24-pin PSU.

[R00k]

I have a 24-pin, but I don't know if it has the white wire or not. I'll check it out, thanks. :icon14:

[R00k]

There's a very light grey wire that I thought might be it, but after checking the manual, my PSU only has +12, +5 and +3.3V.

Still, all the people who are having problems with the PSU are either not getting sound at all, or are getting very weak sound, or can't even get the driver to install. It's a serious hardware issue. Mine works great, except in SS2.

Although I have found other SS2 players who are having this same problem, and have almost identical hardware setups as I do. It's hard to troubleshoot, but I don't really like the idea of buying a new PSU to get the sound to work at all - especially since I just bought this Antec True Blue 2.0 480W for my new system.

[AmIdYfReAk]

i'm not sure what to post rookah, this is more of a post of confedence mang.

they will make a workaround, atleast they should. people are probally comming out of the woodwrk about it.

Also, have you tryed allowing the game to get to the other core? ( on the top post you said you only allowed it to one core )

it may sound weird, but try that out

[R00k]

Yea, I originally had it set to run on both cores - setting the affinity to a single core was one of the things I tried to fix it.

I sure hope they release some kind of patch or workaround soon. It's pretty ridiculous that CroTeam is basically blaming drivers and hardware for not working correctly.

[R00k]

Well holy hell, it looks like Croteam did finally release a patch for the sound problems on dual-core PCs. Just checked their site for the first time in a couple months and whaddaya know:

http://files.seriouszone.com/download.php?fileid=1079

• *Added controling compatibility mode for DirectSound mixing ("software emulation" in "audio options" menu).
  
  * Fixed problem with sound playback and mouse input on multi-(core-)CPU systems.
  
  * Fixed wrong performance detection on Intel integrated graphics chips.
  
  * Fixed wrong profiler timings under dual-core CPUs.

Hopefully I'll be able to give it a spin one night this week to see if everything works. !