Audio Popping/Stuttering While Gaming

InvisiblePrawn · 13 Jul 2012 at 17:08

Hi,

I'm currently using my motherboard's (Asus P8Z68-V G3) onboard sound - Realtek HD Audio - and my trusty pair of AKG K77s for games. At seemingly random intervals, I can hear a small, sharp pop or click as well as a ramerate drop - it seems like the click is causing the FPS drop, not the other way. i can still play with it, it's just really annoying. I play a wide range of games, it seems to happen in all of them.

It is most noticeable in games but also occurs to a lesser extent when listening to music/watching videos etc, which leads me to wonder wether it is linked to CPU/graphics usage.

So far I've tried updating drivers, backdating drivers, turning off the GPU sound (my monitor is connected to my 580 via HDMI), turning off the onboard sound and just using the GPU sound as well as connecting the headphones to directly to the motherboard and not the front panel but to no avail - the clicking still occurs.

I've had nothing but issues with Realtek products on various computers and I know a discrete sound card wound probably fix this but until I get one (thinking about an Asus D2) I'd really like to get this working.

Any ideas/suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Orcvader · 13 Jul 2012 at 18:34

Have you tried the sound drivers directly from the Realtek site? http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads...=3&GetDown=false#High Definition Audio Codecs

InvisiblePrawn · 14 Jul 2012 at 15:16

Thanks for your suggestion. Yes, I tried a variety of drivers, both from Realtek and elsewhere. I'm currently using the latest Realtek drivers.

After some more playing around, I may have fixed or at least noticeably improved the problem. Although I had disabled all effects such as heaphone virtualisation in the HD Audio Manager as well as in windows, it turns out the windows virtualisation was still on. After de-activating the effect, the clicks (as well as the strange FPS drops) seem to have gone.

I'll report back if anything changes.

Thanks again for your help,

anything I don't mind · 14 Jul 2012 at 17:16

Do you have your OS on an ssd and is the power cable of the ssd shared with anything else like another sata drive? I have a similar problem but it makes a buzzing sound at random intervals and causes fps drops and it does not sound healthy, i suspect it is ssd power related.

InvisiblePrawn · 15 Jul 2012 at 09:38

groen said:
Do you have your OS on an ssd and is the power cable of the ssd shared with anything else like another sata drive? I have a similar problem but it makes a buzzing sound at random intervals and causes fps drops and it does not sound healthy, i suspect it is ssd power related.

My OS is on a HDD that is cached by an SSD with my Steam games on the remaining space on the drive. Although the power cable is shared between both drives (my optical drive is running from a molex to SATA power adaptor), my problem sounds slightly different.

Disabling any kind of sound effects like headphone virtualisation greatly improved my issue, you might try that to see if it helps.

Orcvader · 15 Jul 2012 at 15:33

As yes the silly stuff like Dolby surround virtualizer/enhancer and all that junk. Thinking about it, I had the same problems as well when they're enabled. No idea why they're even on as default!