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