SF2 pausing when sounds played

[DavidG]

I have just bought a new laptop (Win 8.1, 8Gb RAM, i7-4720 & 3Gb GTX970M) and am suffering from major problems with all my games.  Whilst the machine is considerably faster than its predecessor and can, in theory, run just about anything I throw at it (I have seen First Eagles 2 in all its glory for the first time and can now finally play the ETO & PTO mods), in practice, things are quite different.

 

The major problem appears to be sound related.  SF2 is pausing for around a second almost every time it plays a sound and the same is happening with IL2 and UT2004.  This is infuriating and completely ruins the game.  Disabling the soundcard fixes the issue, but obviously isn’t an acceptable solution.  I have found 2 threads on Combat Ace which appear to be about this problem and state that it is down to the newer Realtek drivers not supporting the lower sample rates used by older games (SF2 sounds are 11KHz format). Apparently this means that any samples have to be converted in game up to the lowest sample rate the card can handle (44.1KHz) and it’s this ‘re-sampling’ that is causing the pause.

 

The solutions suggested are to revert to using Microsoft drivers, or to manually convert all the sounds to a 44.1KHz rate.  I tried the first option, but no joy, the problem persisted with the Microsoft driver.  The second option isn’t so easy to achieve (I’ve manually converted a few files, but nowhere near enough to test whether this is working - can anyone explain how to do this by batch?) and even the person who suggested it, later doubted if it was having the desired effect.  I’ve actually ended up deleting the 2 speech cat files, which has reduced the amount of stutters considerably, although there’s still the occasional one when other samples are played (explosions, missile launch etc.)  It also means that I’ve got a rather quiet game now (which can be a blessing at times). Of course, non of these fixes solves the issue overall, only in SF2.

 

Now both the threads mentioned are from 2010 and it seems to me that, with RealTek cards being pretty common, there should be a huge number of people out there who could potentially be in the same boat, so why isn’t the internet awash with them?  So does anyone else have any experience of this problem and, if so, have they been able to solve it?  Are there any SF2 players out there who do not have any similar issues and what is different about their systems that might account for this?  Is there anyone who can confirm or refute the theory about the sample rate and can anyone suggest any other possible explanations for the problems I’m suffering?

 

Failing this, does anyone have a set of sound files already converted (and packed into a cat file?) that they would be willing to post?

 

Thanks

[+MigBuster]

Sounds familiar - but no idea how I resolved it years back unfortunately.

 

Remember trying different drivers without much luck.

 

What SF2 patch are you on?

 

Where is the game installed?

 

Have you tried changing in game sound and graphics settings?

 

Have you set up an NVIDIA profile for any of the Games so you can try different things in there?

 

 

Have you run dxdiag?

 

Anyone on Win 8.1 can confirm whether DX9/10 is supported without having to update DX runtimes.

 

Also does the stuttering occur straight away or after your Laptop starts to heat up?

[DavidG]

Thanks for replying MigBuster

 

I’m running July 2013, but I’ve also tried May 2013. (And I actually think I was getting better fps with May 2013, as the ETO & PTO mods are running quite poorly since I installed the last update.)

 

I’ve installed all my games on a second HD, as the OS is on a small mSATA.  I've also redirected the mods to a folder on the the second HD.

 

Yes, I’ve tried different settings, but to no avail and I do have an nVidia profile (I use nVidia Inspector).

 

DXdiag has been run with no issues reported.  I’ve also installed DX9 from Microsoft’s website.

 

The pausing is at all times and from the beginning to the end of any mission, so it’s not a heating issue.

 

I’ve actually installed SF2 onto my desktop PC today (i5-4750, Win 7 64-bit, 8Gb RAM, GTX760, Realtek sound card) and it runs beautifully.  You can, however, occasionally detect a minute pause when some sounds play.  I’m pretty certain that this happens all the time, and probably did so on the old laptop as well, it’s just that they were barely perceptible.  So I believe that the game is performing as it always has, it’s just that for some reason the pauses are vastly longer on the new machine, due to a problem with its performance, some sort of memory issue or some component conflicting with the sound card perhaps.  There are other performance issue with the new laptop (Flaming Cliffs 2 micro-stutters constantly and WOFF runs about 100 fps quicker on the desktop PC), so I’m going to return the machine and order something different.