After playing Crytek’s impressive game Crysis for weeks with very jerky, stuttering audio, which sometimes stopped completely, requiring the game to be restarted in order to hear anything at all, I finally found the fix for the problem.
I am running the game under Vista on an oldish ABIT KN8, nForce4 Motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHz cpu.
To get the graphics running smoothly I added a Gainward GeForce 8800GT 512mb graphics card and finally to try fix the sound I installed a Creative SB X-FI Xtreme Gamer.
Now, I have come across loads of forums whose only answers are “You have the wrong driver!” which is in most cases nonsense really as Vista does seem to update the drivers reasonally soon after a manufacturer’s release.
Anyway, initially the audio in the game sounded just as bad as when I was using the onboard soundcard. Not good!
I’ve disabled the Sound Blaster Enhancements using the control panel and so far the sound problems have not appeared again. Fixed! If you’re having the same trouble, try the following (Vista steps):
Open Control Panel in normal mode. Underneath the Sound Icon you should have an option to Manage Audio Devices. Select the Speakers Icon and click Properties. Click on the Sound Blaster tab at the top of the next window and tick the box to
Disable Sound Blaster Enhancements and click Apply.Then go the Advanced Tab and select the Default Format to be at least 24bit and 96000 Hz (Studio Quality).
This should fix the problem with stuttering audio when playing Crysis! If you still have a bit of sound problems on your box, I suggest experimenting with the Exclusive mode on the advanced tab as mentioned previously too.
