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Huge framerate drops related to sound?

wedgie

wedgie

wedgie

Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2005
Posts
8,538
From a little reading online it seems sound can be one cause of otherwise unexplained fps dips, but how shoould I go about identifying/solving this issue?

Most games I've tried suffer from this, the latest being Just Cause 2 which can drop in an instant from 150-170fps down to 30fps for no apparent reason. Some games have a high enough frame rate that it ends up being barely noticable, sometimes the drop is minimal, but it seems to be present accross most game only to varying degrees. Vsync is currently unusable for me as the drop always cuts into the framerate meaning it never stays locked at 60. Black Ops is the only example I have where there was a direct 1:1 correlation between the dips and the sound (in the title menu there a a beep every second or so and the fps dips were perfectly in sync with this). The underlying problem seems to always be there, even if that is the most blatent example of it.

In Device manager the sound options I have are:

ATI High Definition Audio Device
ATI High Definition Audio Device
Bluetooth Hands-free Audio
Creative SB X-fi
Realtek High Definition Audio was also an option until I disabled onboard audio in bios.

So far I've tried disabling Bluetooth/Creative and tested with Just Cause 2, made no difference. Not sure what to do next, it's getting annoying enough that I'd rather avoid playing any game that is severely affected by this.
 
If your not using them best to disable/uninstall the ATI high definition drivers as well. I know I had conflicts/issues with them and my xonar.
 
Are these GPU related for use with HDMI audio? It's something which I don't use, but is there any drawback to disabling/uninstalling them?
 
Yeah they are for your gpu and I have never had a problem not having them installed. Worth a try, they used to cause havok with my xonar drivers.
 
Will give it a try when I get in from work later, hopefully something will work as it's bloody annoying watching games run like **** when there's no logical reason why they should. 150pfs down to 30fps is taking the **** a bit, especially when it's happening for no other reason than I decided to wander into a certain area of the game world. Even had it with Trine, within the first few minutes of the game it drops when I walk past a specific part of the level, you know there's something not quite right when Trine can't hold a solid 60! :p
 
Uninstalling ATI High Definition Audio Device is pointless as the drivers are reinstalled on startup and I just tried disabling them, made no difference.

I'm at a loss tbh, what else could cause such drastic drops in framerate? To be more specific about what I mean by framerate drops, I loaded up Just Cause 2 and stood the guy still at the very first instance you actually get on the ground (game begins with parachute drop). If I rotate the camera 360 degrees around him, in all but one specific direction the framerate is 150 to 190fps, the instant the camera is pointed in a certain direction, the framerate drops to 30 every time. There is no more or less detail when pointed this way and no more or less actually going on, so it's not as if the gpu has more work to do when faced this way. It's the same with all games that have this problem, it seems completely unrelated to what would be typically classed as performace hits.

Sytem is i7 980x, 12gb ram and 5970 Quadfire, are there any known issues that cause such a drastic drop in fps or indeed any known issues with my particular setup? Seem to read a lot about Crossfire related stutter, but surely not to this extent?
 
You should look more in to the direction that's causing the frame drop. There may be something specific that's being rendered that's causing the problem.
 
The only thing specfic to that direction is the waypoint. Haven't tested it enough to know if the problem is always in the direction if the waypoint, seems a bit random if it is?
 
is there onboard sound on your mobo?

you could always run that instead of your dedicated sc to see if the problem stops.

jobe
 
Framerate drop is indeed always when facing in the direction of the waypoint, how odd.

Onboard is currently disabled through bios, think my next move is to remove sound card and go strictly with onboard.
 
Is it worth ending every none essential process and trying it then before moving on to the step of actually removing hardware?
 
wedgie said:
Is it worth ending every none essential process and trying it then before moving on to the step of actually removing hardware?
Click to expand...

That's a possibility, yeah. I'd also explore the waypoint, get right up to it and see how the FPS changes when you look around.
 
Done that, ran all the way up to it and all the way round it, fps drop is always when facing in the direction of the waypoint, even when it's not actually directly in sight. Haven't been able to find a single other mention of this particular problem which does suggest that it's an inherent flaw in my system.
 
Well, aside from Black Ops it seems like the issue was not connected to the sound. After disabling Crossfire, framerate went from topping out at 200 with regular drops to 30, to now settling around the 120 mark. The only drops are the kind you would typically expect based on what's happening on screen.

Need to work out if it's a dodgy card or simply a problem related to 4 gpu's. Although Crossfire was enabled in CCC, GPU-Z was showing two cores as Crossfire enabled (4 gpu's) and two of them as being disabled. From what I've read there is a bug in GPU-Z that means it shows Crossfire disabled by mistake, though I now have to wonder based on how games are running for me.

Also, I now cannot enable Crossfire again through CCC anyway, screen goes black and stays that way (I've had this before and the only way to get Crossfire enabled again was by driver update which set it to enabled automatically).

Can I pretty much assume the second card is dead, or do I really need to switch cards around and test it first? If single card performance is identical whichever one I use, does that mean I may have a fault elsewhere, mobo perhaps?
 
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