Santa Cruz owners: Audio lags in hardware accel. DX games

[Locutus]

Hi all!

while playing several old DirectX games such as Freespace and System Shock 2 I have experienced a couple of sound lags which occur roughly every 5 minutes. The system would hang and audio repeats a fraction of a second in a loop. After a few seconds gameplay would resume normally.

My system is an Intel chipset based PIII with Win98 SE, DirectX 9 and latest Santa Cruz WDM drivers (sc_4193.exe). Windows runs in ACPI mode and Santa Cruz has its own IRQ.

Anyone experiencing similar problems with DirectSound games?

locutus

[jharris01]

Not sure if this will help but check for IRQ sharing. Maybe your Santa Cruz is sharing an IRQ with something else? Use a program like msinfo32 or AIDA32 to examine your computer's IRQ assigments. Changing it to a different PCI slot might fix your problem.

[Locutus]

Thanks for your tipps. That's usually what I think too whith these symptoms, but I don't think its an IRQ sharing problem. As I said, the card has its own IRQ.

Instead, I tried previous WDM drivers (sc_4161s.zip) without any luck. These drivers also don't seem to have EAX 2.0 compatibility. :-/

After that I installed the somewhat earlier VXD model drivers (s481me9x.zip) and the audio lags are gone (!).

The problem with the WDM drivers might still be ACPI related, but for now I am satisfied. (Although I now lack EAX 2.0 support).

[jharris01]

I would try lowering hardware acceleration on the DirectX panel to standard or no acceleration for the games that give you trouble.

[Locutus]

Unfortunately lowering hardware acceleration (thus forcing software mode) introduces severe audio lag. So this option is more of a last resort, but actually I swapped my SW1000XG for the Santa Cruz to get proper hardware acceleration in the first place.

I guess, I'll stick with the VXD drivers as these seem to work fine. Infact, I think EAX 2.0 is quite expendable as I rarely ever noticed a difference between EAX On / Off. There's only a small handful of games like Descent III where I really heard any difference between EAX and non-EAX mode (back then with SBLive!).

If you ask me 3D audio in games is highly overrated anyways (especially with only stereo speakers).

Anyone interested in this topic can download a demonstration tool called Player3D from sensaura.com (only available through archive.org, though):

http://web.archive.org/web/20070623180748/www.sensaura.com/demos/index.php?article=player3d.htm

This one lets you select different reverb types which are supported through Sensaura 3DPA like EAX 1.0/2.0 and I3DL2 (whatever the latter is).

I find it quite useful for testing the 3D functionality, although I get strange results when using WDM drivers and EAX 2.0. The reverb seems to have too many echo reflections, which somehow can't be turned off. I also notice this when I try to add reverb to the DB50XG daughterboard I hooked up to the Santa Cruz. I wonder if the Santa Cruz' reverb is just very badly implemented, if it's a bug or if it's just a cheap reverb.

Maybe someone can reproduce this...

[jharris01]

Good to hear you found a solution.

[Locutus]

Well, I guess I judged the VXD drivers too early. The audio lags returned. Reinstalling newest drivers...