Windows XP/2K and Creative Sound Cards -- Your FPS Loss?

[The Vision tm]

I posted this on a geforce 3 topic but decided to bring it to another thread.

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Opener my sys specs are

1.2 thunderbird
1 gb of level 2 pc133 memory
2 x 40gb ata100 7200 rpm drives in a RAID 0 stripe
Multi booted with Windows 2000 \ Windows XP \ Windows 98 \ Linux 7.3
SBlive xgamer
Gladiac 920 Geforce 3

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After doing large amounts of testing with several others, we have found that the loss in FPS is mainly due to direct sound issues. We have found that the majority of the lag issues have seem to happen on Windows XP machines and have virtually nothing to do with the Video Card. Using the exact same machine I have loaded Bf1942 on all three OS types. The lag only seems to happen on the XP slice and occasionally on the Win2k slice. The way the kernel for the 2k OS family handles the calls to direct sound differ from the way that the 98 "kernel" handles it. The api calls to this architecture seem to be triggering the loss in FPS. We tried this by altering grahpic levels on the machine including refresh rates, grahpic details, and resolution. The loss in FPS was nearly identical in all tests. We then proceeded to the sound and found that disabling the hardware acceleration and tuning the sound to 11khz with low detail and no music had dramatic increase to overall framerate loss during heavy combat. When you disable your hardware acceleration you basically take the sound decoding from your sound card and make your CPU/Memory use it's cycles to decode it. This should in theory make you lose even more framerate but contrarily makes you gain. For a test to see if you happen to fall into the sound FPS loss issue disable all sound and play the game on a heavy server. It should run like a dream. A lot of people out there are not having issues with the game with lower graphic cards and system specs because they are either not running XP or are not running one of the sound cards that have compatibility issues with their direct sound programming.

This is not a global effect for FPS loss but this has been the cause on well over 15 machines in the past two days. Now given some machines have older vid drivers or out of date Operating System Service Pack levels but the majority of the problems seem to spawn from the sound engine.

There is nothing you can really do to fix but you can try the following until DICE releases a fix.

-- Disable Music
-- Update to the Latest Sound Drivers
-- Lower Overall khz and Sound Quality
-- Enable Hardware Acceleration for the Sound Device
-- Disable Sound all together if you get extremely frustrated

I wish I could be more precise or have an end all fix but I have altered a bunch of things and currently most do not have a dramatic affect in lowering the FPS loss.

Another poster had some suggestions on fixing the issue. I had all of these changes enabled prior to testing which may mean I probably get substantially less FPS loss in game than most. Here are some things that have helped his machine configuration.

POST by Walmart Security
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windows(xp) settings:

sound in control panel..... set speakers to headphones and full acceleration in performance.
run dxdiag and set full acceleration under the sound tab.
change display settings to 32-bit color in properties on desktop.

so pretty much max everything out in windows.

ingame: choose your resolution how you want to play. in sound use hardware acceleration. and use ADSL option for internet game. set 22khz sound and sound quality high.
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I posted this in hopes that people would understand that it isn't the NET code for this product nor is it a poorly coded game. There is just a minor bug in the sound engine which can be easily fixed. We did our tests on a dual p3 1gb server with 2gb of memory on a OC192 fiber connection to the net. The server never dropped in FPS but the client side FPS was horrid. We noticed the FPS normally when a lot of triggers occured in a certain field of view. By reducing all vid settings to ridiculously low then changing them to the utter max, we saw the same results. Again, this is not the cause of all machines issues. We have found it is the major cause of issues.

I hope the above changes have helped or atleast made you understand how a machine that is inferior to yours runs the game a bit better