Possible fix for sound glitches

[The Happy Anarchist]

I had the sound glitching problem some people have experienced on the forums - repeating voices, popping, etc. Some people have had success with leaving the dxdiag window open while playing, but that would only work for me for a flight or two.

As I got deeper into the campaign and had a large scale fight, with many capital ships present nearby simultaneously, my frame rate took a nasty hit (low teens or less) that I hadn't seen before. I tried reducing the resolution from 1920x1080x32 to 1024x728x32 but it didn't seem to help. My system is maybe high end of midrange, but my video card is pretty spiffy so it didn't make any sense to me. I would get terrible framerates prior to even leaving the hangar, so the engine must've been struggling to render something that should have been z-occluded.

So then I disabled shadows.

Holy crap. No sound problems, no popping, no glitches and *liquid smooth* (don't have fraps but they're definitely 60+) frame rates in the busiest of sectors. I was expecting a frame rate improvement, but not the sound problems to go away! The sound problems must be related to either shadow rendering itself or tied to poor framerates?

Try that guys, hope it helps.

I was about ready to go buy another Soundblaster X-Fi (just had mine die so I went to onboard - yuck) to see if that helps, but it looks like it wasn't necesarily a sound card issue.

System Specs (just the pertinent stuff):

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System Information
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Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519)
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.2GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Page File: 255MB used, 3685MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

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Display Devices
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Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
Display Memory: 256.0 MB
Driver Date/Size: 6/23/2006 16:49:00, 4492160 bytes

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Sound Devices
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Description: NVIDIA(R) nForce(TM) Audio
Date and Size: 4/13/2005 12:34:02, 414464 bytes

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DirectInput Devices
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Device Name: CH Pro Pedals USB
Attached: 1

Device Name: CH Flight Sim Yoke USB
Attached: 1

[CEDeaton]

I've tried both the open Dxdiag trick and the turning off shadows trick (seperately and together). I'm still having the stuttering sound problem. Although it is a tad better, it's still far from anything you could call corrected.

I've got a "high-end of mid-range" system with an Athlon 64 3500+, slightly OC'ed 256MB Radeon X800XL, 1.5 Gigs of RAM, X-fi Sound, etc. and it runs everything else I play just fine, including "Company of Heroes", so it's unlikely to be my system causing these issues.

This is not what I've come to expect from Matrix when they release a product. I saw it on the shelves today and actually bought it BECAUSE it was Matrix product and without looking at the web forums first. Oops! (stupid, stupid, stupid - banging head against computer screen)[:@]

Hopefully Matrix will uphold their usual commitment to "getting it right" with another patch that actually fixes these problems. A pity how they're treating their retail market though...[&:]

[CEDeaton]

Apparently "The Gathering Storm" is an oblique reference to the uncorrectable audio artifacts in this game. That's what I thought as first. BUT... if you play it backwards it tells you where Jimmy Hoffa is buried! I'm kidding...

Since my original post I've upgraded to 3 Gigs of RAM and added an Ageia PhySx processor card by BFG. In short, I meet or exceed every recommended configuration requirement to run the game.

Anywho... Seeing that the 5.02 patch was out, I found and dusted off the old game disk, reinstalled, patched, and took a chance that maybe they'd actually fixed a known problem while adding the TrackIR support (yippee!) for the guys on the development team that got one for free from the vendor. Nope. Absolutely no improvement in audio performance. Basically it sounds like a Rap DJ skipping two copies of the same record back and forth with reverb set to maximum. This might not be too bad if this was a game that didn't rely so heavily on the audio in the tutorials but, since it is, this is unacceptable. How this got past testing I have no idea. It's not as if I'm using "Joe's Generic Audio Card". It's a Soundblaster X-Fi, for Pete's sake!

Undaunted and searching for solutions not provided, I turned every graphic option off and set the screen size to 800X600 16 bit. Thinking that would surely free up enough resources to fix the problem. Then I could turn one thing at a time back on until I found the tipping point that makes the audio hiccups begin. End result... now I have horrible graphics that remind me of my Apple IIe back in 1985! The audio still runs just a poorly as before.

Aside from how to fix this, what I don't understand is why only a few people seem to mention this problem in the forum. Is the download version actually fully-functional? Is it possible that I just got a bad disk? Since nobody from Matrix has ever replied to this thread, I'm at a loss. This is the Support forum, right? [&:]

While what I can see of the game LOOKS great, it SOUNDS like Mel Tillis when he's not singing. until this problem can be resolved, my advice to anyone that hasn't already bought Starshatter is to go pick up a copy of Freelancer by Microsoft. It can readily be found for $20.

[wdboyd]

"what I don't understand is why only a few people seem to mention this problem in the forum."
 

Gee, could it possibly be that very few people are having this problem?

That's not likey... if it is a game fault. Is it?

[Charles Lamb]

Hope you find the cause of your sound glitching. I fly some very demanding flight simulators and find that turning sound acceleration down to standard or even basic in the windows control panel can really help with Audigy type sound cards with some applications (and with onboard sound). Go as basic as possible and slowly introduce new features until you find the culprit.
Another possibility could be related your PCI Latency settings also. The PCI subsystem is getting aged and regardless of a super fast processor, state of the art graphics card...it can cause a data bottleneck. Check out a program called Latency tweaker possibly ?

That aside thanks for the turn Shadows off tip !
My frame rates went from the stuttery teens to a constant silky smooth 75. (monitor refresh rate)


[:)]

[spaceranger]

Hey there Craig, I've had no sound problems like those reported here. I'm only on an Intel 3.0 HT proc, 2GB RAM, Radeon 6600GT video card. I cannot run the game with all of the video options, but most, and at 1024.

Apart from going the bios checking/update route (for sound hardware and motherboard), if your DX setup is ok, I don't know what it could be.

If I run into this issue, I'll pop back in after looking at it.

Good luck!

[CEDeaton]

ORIGINAL: wdboyd

Gee, could it possibly be that very few people are having this problem?

That's not likey... if it is a game fault. Is it?

Well, I just don't have any idea how since nobody from Matrix has even attempted to reply to or acknowledge this problem in any of the few posts that are out there about this. I'm not alone with this problem, but it does seem to be rare.

Your reply, however, was very helpful. It never occurred to me that my problem might be a rare one until you brought it up. Certainly the lack of large numbers of posts about it never crossed my mind as meaning I might have an unusual problem. WOW!! Thanks for the helpful info there "Matrix Hero"! [&o]

[spaceranger]

ORIGINAL: CraigDeaton

Well, I just don't have any idea how since nobody from Matrix has even attempted to reply to or acknowledge this problem in any of the few posts that are out there about this. I'm not alone with this problem, but it does seem to be rare.

Your reply, however, was very helpful. It never occurred to me that my problem might be a rare one until you brought it up. Certainly the lack of large numbers of posts about it never crossed my mind as meaning I might have an unusual problem. WOW!! Thanks for the helpful info there "Matrix Hero"! [&o]

I emailed Matrix support and then PM'ed and got a response. Ironically, I received a response from Milo just when I realized the issue I had was my own fault, and resolved it.

Have you PM'ed any of the Matrix mods?