surround sound...

[nobby]

I bought a £12 audigy surround sound card.

I bought £65 Über surround sound headphones.

however, I find whenever I put my games in surround sound, my FPS DIES !

BF2142 Is Unplayable !

It's nonstop stuttering !

also where I'd normally get 60 FPS, I go down to 20 !

What can I do ?

[giga191]

spend more on a soundcard, and less on headphones.

[Dribble Joy]

Or just not use all this fancy technical tomfoolery and just rock on with your two little stereo speakers sitting either side of your monitor....

[Nidhogg]

Nobby, do you ever post anything on topic? Check out the threads you've started (http://forum.neocron.com/search.php?do=process&showposts=0&starteronly=1&exactname=1&searchuser=nobby). BF have forums of their own you know...

N

/edit - oh yeah, and the answer is to spend the money on a decent sound card rather than headphones (that don't even do surround sound :p) ;)

[nobby]

This is for ALL games.

I used BF2142 as an example of what I'm facing :(

[Dribble Joy]

In all seriousness, a twelve squid sounscard doesn't provide much hope for it being able to handle much, probably why your cpu or whatever is getting over loaded with playing the sound. Though to be honest, it does sound odd, I've got onboard sound and I've never had problems with it, even in HL or NC, and I've got a 1.4 athlon.

[Mighty Max]

Sounds like an pci-master issue. Some pci slots can't be used as pci-master (and therefor acting in a dma-like mode) in some conditions (i.e. some pci slots share the pci master addressline with the agp slot)

The result is that all data transfers have to be done by the cpu and therefor reducing the performance.

Try switching the pci slot you are using for the soundcard, and check if maybe "busmaster mode" isn't disabled somehow in the driver.

[SizZLeR]

Imo spending money on soundcards for todays pc if its only for games is a laugh, most samples in games are poor quality anyway..

The problem may besides what MightyMax describes, also lie in the soundbuffer, if it handles 6 or 7 chns in 16-bit 44.1khz then some audio data needs to be generated.

Setting a larger buffer may solve the problem, at least some of the way.
When i use softsynths with Cubase SX3, i encounter stuttering sound when i set the buffer to low, typically i have it at 512kb meaning a delay of approx 12ms, the more polyphony i use (the more notes i play at the same time) the more chance of stuttering sound, because of the stacking of audio being played back thru the soundcard.

Then imagine how many samples are actually due for playback if u have say a constant ambience sound, then maybe some aircrafts, ppl running around u shooting and on top of all that, it has to be encoded into digital sourround and then decoded on the soundcard and sent to different chns. ;)

Try and raise the buffer see if that helps. :)

[Nidhogg]

There are a couple of games out there that can appreciate a decent sound card, but not many.

N