FIXED - Stuttering Sound problem in ETW

[Sammyboi]

Hello all, long time reader and very rare poster!

I've been playing ETW for only a couple of weeks, and was suffering from a game-breaker of an issue. Whenever I played I would get about 15 mins into it, then the sound would go nuts. It began to stutter (music, SFX, speech the lot) and the whole system lagged on each stutter (i.e. not just ETW, my system would continue to do so after I'd quit the game). I searched the net for hours and found no solution to the problem, other than to turn all sound off in the game. Which worked, but of course who wants to play like that?

I tried a couple of things on a hunch, and am delighted to say it worked! I'm posting my solution here in the off chance that anyone else is having a similar issue. I don't see any threads about this from a quick search, leading me to believe it's fairly rare issue. I don't know if this is the 'sound issue' which the latest patch says is still unresolved, maybe.

Anyway, this fix assumes you are using a standalone sound card. I can't be sure whether it's one of these steps or a combination of both which fixed the problem, so just do both.

1) power off your PC and switch it off at the mains. Open the case and find the sound card. Relocate the sound card to a different PCI slot, and make sure you plug the speaker lead back in.

2) close up the case and boot, going into BIOS (that's usually done by tapping DEL during boot). Locate your motherboards onboard sound controller and disable it. Exit saving changes.

Done
You may need to reinstall your sound card drivers as Windows may think it's a new device. I've not had a single stutter since, and overall performance is slightly improved. I suspect this works due to congestion on the PCI controller. Whatever the explanation, this worked for me and hopefully by posting it here it'll work for some other poor soul who was tearing out their hair

Sam

[♔KillZoneGB♔]

Hi sam, sounds Like a IRQ problem, so you now have you SC furthest away from the GPU(as it should be)?

in the userscript or preference i found by putting these commands helps out on the sound.

sound_file_caching true;
sound_channels 128;
audio_memory_size_in_megabytes 180; (more if you got the memory to spare)
sound_variations 0;

gets rid of the snap crackle and pop.

Kind regards

Charlie

[Sammyboi]

Yes, I agree an IRQ conflict is the most likely cause of the issue. I had also noticed it happening when installing a large game from DVD (such as ETW!), but I had never gotten around to properly investigating it as it had never occurred during play until now. Physically the soundcard is actually closer to the GPU than before, although when viewing it on Device Manager it appears to be considered further away. Bit of a lucky hunch really!

Although my installation now runs perfectly I'll be looking into the config settings you've suggested, just in case. Looks like increasing the size of the buffer for audio memory could be a good idea, although at the moment I'm not experiencing any of the popping etc which I'm aware a lot of players are being plagued by.

Thanks!

[ordoprinceps]

I know this thread has had no activity in years but just in case, I have a sound problem with ETW that I cannot resolve. I a battel everything starts out fine as the battle takes more time the sound begins to cut out. First battle sounds, then music, then ambient sounds to total silence. After the battle the game is either silent or just the advisors voice is heard. Does anyone have any suggestions? I have done clean reinstalls, and tried disabling the Nvidia digital sound but nothing seems to work.