Some good news on the sound problem some of you are experiencing. If you are using a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio card, user joebeard found that turning the audio mode to basic and updating to the latest drivers allows him to play with sound and without a performance problem.


Here is the thread:
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=270

We will keep working to get the full accelerated mode. Happy hunting everybody!


________________________
ScubaTron

GPGnet Community Manager

"Evil will only triump when good men do nothing."

This trick helps, but doesn't solve the issue (at least for me). The gameplay does seem to be more stable after setting it to basic.

For the ppl who do not know where to alter these settings:

Select RUN from you start menu.
Type "DxDiag" and press enter.
Pick the tab called "sound".
There should be a slider in the middle.
set that slider to basic and close the window.

Good luck!

In vista I do not see this "basic" slider...is it indeed there? I'm going nuts with this slow issue due to sound.

Hmm interesting. But honestly, its nice that gpg works on getting it to work properly, but frankly the creative drivers Suck, especially for vista atm. And look at their forums, they cant even give an estimate of a driver update. Prolly 5 months away. So mad at them, alot of games that have sound issues due to the drivers being crap :/

I have had a look around as I also have sound issues, though I have seen no clear deffination.

I played the demo no sound issues at all...

In the game though, although I intitally get sound after awhile it starts breaking up / crackling / or getting random noise, almost like its rapidly repeating the sounds, some times I can stop it by zooming all the way out, some times not.

To remedy this I have tried plugging into both my Augigy 2 ZS abd onboard card, and the issue ios still present.

From this and what I have read else ware it must be realted to some difference in the sound side of things between the Demo and release, so I would hope its will be an easy fix.

It would be interesting if others who have sound issues true the demo and see if they have problems or not, as it may hep the developers lock down where the problem is.

I tested this solve more... It does improve performance quite a bit. I'm playing through the aeon campaign without too many performance drops. They are still present though. But I can play through the campaign good enough. It also seems that the slowdowns aren't that present in skirmish. The game performs better in skirmish than it does in the campaign mode.

Does anyone know if creatives alchemy project applies here?

http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx

It is a wrapper that allows for sound card acceleration in Vista, since Microsoft no longer supports it.

And the part to pay attention to is:

....... user joebeard found ......

Every one read that a second time, yes thats right, the user found a solution. While the com mags have told us to upgrade our nvidia drivers to the latest 4 month old version, defrag our hard drives, and make sure aim is closed to save ram. **Slaps forehead** Damn it, how could I forget to close aim, and put those 9mb of ram to use for sup com, as if the 2048mbs isnt enough.

There is also a problem with intigrated sound cards that won't give you any sound at all


Linky: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=299


Edit: Can a community mannager confirm that they are also working on the issues with intigrated sound cards? (To be totally sure that the devs are listening)

Hi. The devs are listening, and we're working on ALL sound issues, but cannot promise that every issue for every configuration gets addressed perfectly.

Well then all there is to do now is to sit down and pray to the gods of gaming that the patch will come soon and fix the problems.

What I don't get is why the Demo works perfectly but the full game gives me stuttering sound. I've tried an Auzentech Xplosion and Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio card and get the same results with both. What is different between the Demo and Full game that would account for sound working in the demo?

Anyway, can't wait for the patch so I can stop playing the demo and get into the real game.

for me with Aureon 7.1 space i have no crackling sounds or weird ones the only problem is the super performance hit in both demo and full version.Btw i have 3d Sensaura activated and this is my acceleration.

Hehe, nice... Well at leased we knoe your looking in to it. I have faith that you guys ccan fix things

I have a X-Fi Xmusic.

When i slide to basic i get no sound effects, just music.

And /nosound doesn´t really make a difference.

I thought about actually pulling out the card from my mobo and try with my on board sound card

anyone tried that?

/nosound works for me, but i have friend who had to unistall all his drivers to sound card to see some improvments

i personally get a MASSIVE performance boost when i use the /nosound switch, with a Live! 5.1 card

I have an Audigy 2 Value and when I plug in my headphones to my sound card jack I can only hear the music, IE no shooting or explosion sounds. Also in the campaign I can't hear the people telling you your next objectives.

Otherwise sound barely affects my perftest.

I get a big performance boost from /nosound. My card is an auzentech X-plosion.

Perftest with nosound: 45.8
Perftest with sound: 67.8

Well out of desperation, I switched to onboard sound and downloaded the latest RealTek Vista drivers. And the game WORKS now. The movies don't chop and the sound effects play perfectly. Haven't done any benchmarking yet but it feels very smooth now without the sound problems. So I can finally play the game.

So for any Vista users having sound problems you might want to try your onboard sound. Plus everything else (other games, movies and music) sounds better with the Realtek drivers than with either the Creative X-Fi or Auzentech Xplosion. So I'll be sticking with them until I see a lot more mature drivers from either of the other companies.

For anyone getting the lagging issues when sounds play, please disable any virus scanners you may have. This fixed the problem for me. I was getting horrible stuttering whenever a sound played. My virus scanner was scanning each damn file every time it was played. Also did this while loading the game.

Every time I clicked on an unit or building, the FPS would drop to around 5 for a second. Now there is absolutely no lag. The game also loads in seconds now.

Computer spec:
Opteron 180 @ 2.6
8800 GTS 640 @ 545/845
2 GB ram

I have a audigy 2 sound card and get only a slight performance boast by disabling sound but not enough to make the game playable. Also there appears to be some issues with sound positioning when using surround sound.

"disable virus scanner ...." is a stupid advise from stupid people for stupid people ....


if you think your AV is reducing performance , go into settings of your AV of choice, and add the games executable to trusted zone (or whatever it is called in your AV) , but for g.. sake, people, stop telling people to "disable Anti Virus , Firewall etc, it's just stupid, period.

I've got an X-Fi here and performance out of the box was pathetic. As a TA veteran, I expected this game to be a beast once units were up, but not from the get-go.

I came on this forum and poked around over the weekend, found someone who suggested the /nosound solution, worked like a charm.

A deaf, mute charm that is. Having no sound sucks, but beats the hell out of poor performance.

Anyways, I'm surprised this slipped through beta. But I see some saying they didn't have this issue with the demo, so maybe something changed between beta and gold?

Not sure, but people should stop complaining. Return the game if you can't wait for them to fix this.

If anyone remembers Company of Heroes release (also THQ coincidentally), they had a major SLI issue. Imagine my surprise when I came home and loaded that puppy, ran the ingame benchmark, and found that my 7900 SLI was giving me 12 FPS on modest settings.

A week later they released a patch that addressed it.

Moral of the story - this game will be patched, just bask in its soundless glory for now.

I don't believe the problem is limited to Audigy and X-Fi chipsets. I have a Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit External sound card that I regularly use with my laptop. With it running, I usually averaged 30 FPS. Without it, completely uninstalled, I get 45-60 FPS at the start, 30 FPS when more stuff is built and running.

So, I think it maybe just Creative products in general. And it could be something wrong with Creative, not SC. They might try to update the drivers so that the Creative chipsets don't interfere with SC.