Mayro

Hello everyone, I think I might have found or atleast belive some people, that there is a problem with newer cat drivers or the other thing that is a decideing factor in this little free for all.

If you have a radeon video card around the specs of the 9800 pro and also have a soundblaster live 5.1 or some other kinda close card, or feel that the following is happening to you, please post as much info as you can so we can try to get enough information for this to get fixed....

After my last post about BOS 'Bet On Soldier' I was almost convinced that it was the SF3 causeing the problems with the game. The developer is saying that it is the newer catalyst drivers 'ATI HARDWARE' along with soundblaster sound cards, competing for the data coming from the game.
*AKA* The reason we get a VPU reset with higher settings or newer drivers is becuase the sound card and the video card are both trying to recive the massive ammount of data comeing from the game. With both of these competeing for the data, it is the soundblaster that is killing the radeon, or the radeon just giveing up.

I would have thought this to be BS from the company, but I got one of those wonderfull burs to play Warhammer dawn of war. After patching up to 1.4, I was suprised to see that after the game was tweaked and optimized and upgraded, that I was reciveing such horrid performance that it wasent even funny. Getting ready to del it and wait for the expansion, I decided to check the Dawn of war message board for help, evidently, playing the game with older ati drivers, (5.4) results in the game running like normal with no performance hit at all.

**If anyone can help by listing any problems that you feel might also somehow be linked to the video card competeing with the sound card or this with some combination of what driver you are useing, please list it here.*

Thanks

cswiger

The problem you're talking about is probably related "PCI latency timing", and reflects how long one device can monopolize the PCI bus without letting other devices have a turn. It's regrettably common for graphic card vendors to crank their driver to using the highest possible latency setting, since that gives marginally higher benchmark #s, but at the cost of potentially starving the sound card and causing stutters or looping sounds.

It also seems to be the case that Creative SB cards somewhere around the Live, Live 5.1, and Audigy 1 don't use the PCI bus that efficiently, either, and are more sensitive to this issue of bus timing then they ought to be: Creative is far from blameless here, and their tech support and driver support leave something to be desired.

Try cranking your video card latency down to 64, 96, or 128 via ATT or some other tweak utility, and see whether that helps. Also, I think someone published a similar registry tweak for the Creative cards which might also help, but I don't have a link handy...

I was having some problems along these lines, including looping sounds and VPU recovers in Call of Duty about a year ago with an Audigy 1; so I spent the $80 to pick up an Audigy 2ZS and hooked it up to the Audigy 1 drive bay ("Platinum eX"?) and the Audigy 2 seems to do a lot better.

YMMV.

Something else to check for is to make sure that all devices are getting their own IRQ, or at least you aren't sharing an IRQ between two high-data-rate devices like your video card, sound card, or NIC. (If you have a USB controller on the same IRQ, that's probably not a big deal.) You might havta play with IRQ assignments in your BIOS and/or move your sound card over one PCI slot, and see whether that helps.

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Mayro

Thanks, that is what alot of people are saying. While I think that is a solution, I think there is a bigger problem some where in there too. The 5.6 cat set does not have this problem with warhammer or BOS, but the 5.8 do. Something changed from 5.6 to 5.8, that is what im trying to find out and create a permanent fix in the drivers so that people who dont read the forums get a working game

Leekay07

MMM the same problem occurs to my system and Im running PCI-E (not using the same games) but in genral I found that my system can not handle Large amounts of game data without constant VPU rests which kill game play.

I think its the CCC. Why not try just installing the video driver and nothing else (forget control panel software and CCC) and see how it runs then. I found this to be the only answer to my current problems.

Its not an IRQ issue. Because if it was it just wouldnt run.

It could be a latency problem but I highly doubt it because in the end AGP,PCI and PCI-E are on totaly diffrent timings On the other hand constant memory leaks from drivers and errata on chips do often cause devices to loop. Which is the reason vpu rest was put there.

Sometimes devices miss the bus of info (often this is a power leakage in a transistor which fails to flip gate or flips another gate which it wasn't supposed to) so they wait for it to come arround but because it was missed it never knows what to do. But the VPU reset says hey start over and basicly tells it to hold its hand out again for the next one to arrive.

Hope I never lost you.

In basic what I am saying is I have a gut feeling that AI and CCC are not exactly working as its designed to or it may have some software to hardware issues that have yet to be resolved.

SB 5.1 is software driven not exactly any hardware in it. Its basicly a codec on a addon board. Dependent on cpu cycles and not a data bandwidth issue.

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PoopyTheJ

Mayro that 5.1 is hogging massive CPU cycles especially if you have the sound turned up, see if you can borrow a newer audigy2/4 which uses FAR less Cpu usage and see if it helps, or disable sound in game completely. and see if that helps progbably a command switch somewhere /nosound on the command line or something, not familiar with the game but most games do...

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