directx bad sound hardware acceleration emulated lockup hang and freeze problems

[chris]

Hi,

You tried "everything!" and are familiar with this catchwords?:
Pci-Slots, DMA, various Bios-settings, DXDiag, Irq, Drivers, WDM,
Sound/Graphic-Acceleration, Multimedia-Properties, Chipset-Drivers,
Secure-Mode, Motherboard-Issues and so on.

Your Problem occurs with:
mostly Windows 2000/XP, Directx (mostly v9.0xx), a sound card (mostly
Creative), some newer Games,
and the secret little devil that makes the magic difference!!!

Your have this trouble:
Disorted sound, crackling, looping, no sound. Hangups, Stalls, Crashes
mostly in gaming-Conditions.

What You might also have found out:
Sound driver not implemented correctly, showing "emulated" on full hardware
setting in DxDiag..
The Sound-Hardware is definately correctly installed (DeviceManager) and
working.

DxDiag testing only with Software-Buffered Sound with the mighty chirping
cricket, last window says that there is no hardware buffer available. Well,
the sound was there, so DxDiag possibly thinks its by design, not a mistake.

My solution after comparing different registry-files i collected:
I found differences in the values of WDM and VxD DWords. Searching for
"Device Presence"-keys worked good for me. Some had Value zero, some 1.
DWord "emulated", on my machine was always 1. I took every WDM and VxD to
one and it did the trick.

(i am not responsible for what You do with Your registry!!! ;)

May this post be found by people with the same problems, MS-Gurus and
Creative-Guys. If anybody knows, why and under what circumstances this
problem occurs, and if there is an easier fix apart from reinstalling,
please let me know.

regards,
Chris

[Neil Dela Osa (MS]]

That was a good bit of troubleshooting. Thanks for sharing it with the
newsgroup. I'm curious what those settings mean myself.

There's a lot of issues that contribute to audio crackling. One example is
PCI bus bandwidth limitations. Gigabit ethernet adapters or RAID arrays
with more than two drives can suck up most of the bus bandwidth shared with
other PCI cards.

There are hardware bugs as the "SBLive and VIA chipset" issue from a few
years ago illustrated.

Here's the argument saying it's Creative's fault:
http://alive.singnet.com.sg/tech/via.htm

And here's the arguments saying it's VIA's fault:

http://tech-report.com/onearticle.x/3280

http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/index.html

Sometimes it isn't even hardware bugs but the unfortunate combination of
hardware tolerances for memory, chipsets, and audio devices. The different
devices just happen to be on the edge of the acceptable range but
unfortunately they're on opposite sides of the ranges.

Sometimes it's software bugs which are fixed by operating system patches,
driver updates, or patches to the application itself. I've read a few
readme files for game patches that specifically mention "fix for audio issue
on card...."

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[Neil Dela Osa (MS]]

I talked with a developer and they told me the Device Presence registry key
is the way that DirectSound "remembers" whether it's in emulation mode or
not. When it's set to 0 on the WDM device, DirectSound is forced to use
the "via waveOut" (emulated) device. The VxD device setting is ignored on
NT because it doesn't support vxd drivers.

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights.
Please do not send email directly to my alias. This alias is for newsgroup
posting only.

"Neil Dela Osa (MS]" <nei...@online.microsoft.com> wrote in message
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