[Chaos]

We would like to update all Sound Blaster X-Fi users that are experiencing the popping/crackling issues with the very latest news on this issue.

We have been working extensively with a large number of systems and the vendors of those systems to diagnose and find remedies for reported symptoms of audio crackling and distortion, particularly during game playing. Thanks to the extensive and accurate reporting of these issues, approximately two months ago we were able to reproduce the crackling and distortion symptoms on some systems. All of those that exhibited the symptoms were high-end spec gaming systems. We have since been identifying other systems that exhibit these symptoms as well as working hard to identify the causes of these symptoms.

Before moving into the specific detail of our findings we feel it would be helpful to cover off some background information on how audio is handled and delivered in a PC system. Firstly it is important to understand the significance of system memory and relationship between it and the audio card. System memory is in fact the source of the many building-block streams of audio data that a sound card receives from a game or other application. Most importantly a sound card that is designed to significantly enhance and process system audio has a fundamental requirement for quick access to this system memory. Audio streams are continually being read in from system memory to the sound card, and the Creative X-Fi chip processes and mixes these streams into the final multi-channel output. The sound card does have on-board storage that allows it to tolerate being held off from memory access for some amount of time, and in fact, this tolerance for being held off, which we call latency tolerance, is higher for Sound Blaster X-Fi than it was for previous generations. At the same time, the enhanced capabilities of Sound Blaster X-Fi require that it read in a larger amount of data than previous generations of sound cards, although much less than a graphics card or hard drive requires. The impact of a delay in receiving data to a graphics card is slower frame-rate, whereas to audio there is a far more significant impact. Because audio is so “real-time” any delay in receiving data causes a break in the audio stream and this break translates to pops and clicks in the audio stream.

So now to our findings: We believe that the larger volume of data being requested is, in some systems, causing larger access delays to system memory, especially when Sound Blaster
X-Fi is sharing memory access with high-end graphics and/or hard drives. We have found that with certain high-end systems and configurations, Sound Blaster X-Fi is being held off from receiving data from the PCI bus for significant periods of time, in some cases for close to two-thirds of a millisecond. This causes our audio buffers to underflow, which produces crackling sounds. The obvious answer to this would be to increase the latency tolerance, but due to the requirement for audio to synchronize accurately with graphics, we cannot increase the latency tolerance beyond a certain point.

Our tests have proved that in many cases these problems can be remedied with a simple BIOS update but this did not resolve the issues for all customers experiencing the issues. We therefore continued to investigate and have made a significant finding. In some systems we have resolved the issues by setting the motherboards to dual-channel memory mode to improve the memory bandwidth and response. Below you can see the configuration of two of the systems that we initially experienced issues with and subsequently resolved by setting to dual-channel memory mode.




With these two machines we ran tests with Battlefield 2, which is the title with the most reported issues. We found that as long as the system memory was configured in dual-channel mode, the Sound Blaster X-Fi card did not crackle. When memory was not dual-channel, crackling could occur in the game and when crackling was occurring, the Sound Blaster X-Fi service requests on the PCI bus were being held off for long periods.

The way to invoke dual-channel memory mode differs by machine. For system 1, installing 1 GB memory DIMMs in memory slots 1 and 2 invoked dual-channel mode, whereas for system 2, installing 1 GB memory DIMMs in memory slots 1 and 3 invoked dual-channel mode.

We recommend checking your motherboard's manual to ensure that memory is configured for dual-channel.

N.B. Installing 4 GB (one DIMM in each of the four slots) is not advised for Windows XP 32-bit. It is recommended to install less than 3GB total memory, and the size of memory in both of the channels must be the same for dual-channel operation.

As highlighted before, in some cases a simple BIOS update resolved the issues, but in others these changes to memory configuration were required also.

These findings go a long way to resolving the issues that many customers are having, but we believe that there may be some other system-related issues that may continue to cause these symptoms for some remaining customers. We are therefore working with prominent motherboard and chipset manufacturers such as nVidia to explore ways to balance the needs of systems such that all of the components, including the sound card, are functioning at peak efficiency and we will be reporting back on these issues in the next 2 weeks.

However we want to highlight that some reported crackling issues were found to be normal clipping that can easily be resolved by balancing audio settings. We specifically found that some game titles produce a very strong audio output signal that in some circumstances can overload our hardware DSP algorithms, such as CMSS-3D and 24-bit Crystalizer. While this issue is not at all related to the PCI bus traffic issues described above, the result of this is a distortion that might be described as "crackling" (although technically it is "clipping"). We would therefore recommend that all customers run a very simple test. Please try turning down either the game volume, or the Windows "Wave" volume, to see if this remedies the problem. If it does, it would be really helpful if you would notify us of this.

As a final note, we understand the desire of our customers to squeeze every last drop of performance from your systems. In most cases once the very latest hardware has been purchased and installed, the CPU, graphics, USB and every other device has been overclocked there is only one last thing to do – find and install the very latest drivers and BIOS updates – and many customers do so even if they are beta versions. We would suggest to all of our customers that if they experience issues while using drivers or BIOS updates for any product that are labeled as "Beta" or that in any other way are not considered "released and supported" by their respective manufacturers, that they immediately downgrade back to the last release version. As such software / firmware is not fully qualified by the vendor's QA team, the chances of problems occurring when used in conjunction with Creative or any other 3rd party products is increased.




Cat

Message Edited by Catherina-CL on 05-17-2006 02:30 PM



Forum Administrator
Creative Labs

[BWX]

Interesting..

I love my Fortissimo III 7.1 .....

[dipstick]

WTH!! Just recently I had to RMA by bros ram and had to give him one of my mem sticks until his get back. Since, I have noticed some extreme distortion in games(mainly FEAR). It sounds like I turn the volume all the way up and I put my speaker plug on a piece of metal(if you've tried pluggin your speakers in to your soundcard while they were on and you miss the hole you know what Im talking about lol). Very weird stuff indeed.
Also this might be coincidence but my bros A2 ZS caught on fire during this single channel period also. A small block type thingy near the pci connect was pumping black smoke and pretty much blew up. Will post some pics when I get home but it definitely has me thinkin after reading your post

[Judas]

yes.... love the fortissimo 3 alot indeed..

Also like my HD Realtek ALC882.... steller audio quality/performance


In any case, i've noticed alot of creative cards all seem to overdrive the signal, frankly i don't care what they figure is happening and that a game or audio file has a "to loud" of a signal strength causing distortion.. that's utter bullshit. When just about every other conceiveable card or onboard audio device plays it back without flaws... reguardless of dual channel mode or not... (what a load there.. dual channel mode causing it.. rotfl)...

It sounds more like a driver issue and bad hardware engineering still....


tiss sad.... i had an Asus A8N-E rev 2.0 in dual channel mode with 1gb and 2gb... and the x-fi still produces stupidity. Even this A8R32-MVP and a MSI RD482-4 board same results... And some of the issues were right in windows...


Yet again i say "BULLSHIT" to creative....

And yet again, i find it halarious that Dual Channel Memory mode is absalutely nessary for an audio card.

[Chaos]

Originally Posted by Judas

And yet again, i find it halarious that Dual Channel Memory mode is absalutely nessary for an audio card.

It's only needed if you dont want the noise to go along with your audio

[Judas]

noise shouldn't excist due to not running in dual channel plain and simple.. there should be ALOT of bandwidth yet to handle even a 192khz multi channel audio stream.

[Chaos]

I was being sarcastic Judas, I figure you knew that

[BWX]

Originally Posted by Judas

yes.... love the fortissimo 3 alot indeed..

Also like my HD Realtek ALC882.... steller audio quality/performance


In any case, i've noticed alot of creative cards all seem to overdrive the signal, frankly i don't care what they figure is happening and that a game or audio file has a "to loud" of a signal strength causing distortion.. that's utter bullshit. When just about every other conceiveable card or onboard audio device plays it back without flaws... reguardless of dual channel mode or not... (what a load there.. dual channel mode causing it.. rotfl)...

It sounds more like a driver issue and bad hardware engineering still....


tiss sad.... i had an Asus A8N-E rev 2.0 in dual channel mode with 1gb and 2gb... and the x-fi still produces stupidity. Even this A8R32-MVP and a MSI RD482-4 board same results... And some of the issues were right in windows...


Yet again i say "BULLSHIT" to creative....

And yet again, i find it halarious that Dual Channel Memory mode is absalutely nessary for an audio card.

Hey I have never tried my on-board audio on my A8N-E rev 2

It is just AC97 8 channel - but it any good? (sound wise)

I was thinking about trying it out just to see the difference in games and whatnot.. It isn't a DSP but maybe it will still sound OK? I have never used on-board sound ever in my life actually.. on any system I have built or worked on or owned.

[Judas]

The Asus A8N-E rev 2 has i think the ALC850 realtek chipset... it's pretty good... but the ALC882 is much much better...

I ran with my Onboard audio for that asus board and it produces great results..... Long as you try and get the latest drivers (which may prove difficult as realtek doesn't provide a reference driver for that chipset)

And it's not really AC'97 ..... it's just a generica name, i think when you go to install the drivers, it'll actually show up as Realtek something or other...

my current onboard audio ALC882 is using the HD Realtek chipset.... by all means, it appears to support absalutely everything i throw at it.. EAX, you name it.... and the digital out is damn good (even though atm, i'm running it using analog jacks)... I'm VERY impressed with it's recording quality as well.

Installation is flawless, and it performs great and works without bloat (after installing and setting up, remove SoundMan.exe from the startup along with anything else that may be loaded, as it isn't nessary and won't effect anything if you don't want it loading )

[Judas]

Originally Posted by Chaos

I was being sarcastic Judas, I figure you knew that

lol.. my bad...

[Razgriz]

what if you change the irq setting in the BIOS to make sure it's not running on the same channel as the vga adapter?

[BWX]

Last week I was hunting for drivers and found what I thought was the latest driver for that chip- latest I could find anyway.
ver:A3.66

I think i may try it.. just to see the difference..



I have been thinking about getting an Audigy for the longest time.. but damn those bloated drivers, and forget about pops and snaps.. that would drive me insane.

[Judas]

as far as i can tell... the latest ALC850 drivers are the asus supplied ALC850 V5900... you can get these by looking up the A8N32-SLI board drivers and finding the audio driver for it in the driver section.. do not worry, both boards have the same chipsets.. and they work without flaws

the 3.66 drivers i beleive are quite old mind you.

[BWX]

V5.10.0.5242 Realtek Audio Driver V5.10.0.5242 for Windows 2000/XP/XP MCE/2003 2006/05/16

hmmm.......

http://support.asus.com/download/dow...Language=en-us

Ooops I followed the wrong link--

[Judas]

er.... wait.. i'm using x64.. lol. sorry

[BWX]

That was to a different mobo anyway- i have to see if there is a new one..


Version V5.10.00.5750
2004/12/01update
OS Win2K / WinXP / Win2003
Description Realtek AC''97 Driver V5.10.00.5750
for Windows 2000/XP(WHQL)/2003.


That's the latest listed for my mobo..

EDIT
After downloading I see it is A3.66 LOL...

[Judas]

hey
remember, that reguardless of the mobo.... as long as it the same mobo supplier.. some of the drivers ment from the same chipsets will work on older boards long as they have the same chipsets..

so if the a8n32-sli board has a newer 32bit driver.. i'd suggest downloading it since it's still for the same chipset (Realtek alc850)

[BWX]

Yeah I looked and couldn't find any newer.. the Asus website sucks though.. disorganized mess.

[Judas]

yeah i agree....

[Alien1]

I am using a A8N32 with latest bios and a X-Fi Fatality
and i do not experience any Crackling sounds fortunately

Happened only in some very rare cases (once or twice during GTA San Andreas main menu selection as far as i remember)

[Judas]

creative = crap.... to the point, and true to word.... it's not rare.. it just seems like it.... until it happens to you or you realize what causes it in some cases....


My X-FI worked fine in single channel mode on the msi board... and asus.... so those guys are full of shit yet again.... Course on the asus a8r32-mvp.. it didn't fair to well with only 1gb single channel mode.... but then again, it didn't fair to well in dual channel anyways....

[Tipstaff]

Cuz I'm such a nice guy:

Realtek AC97 Drivers version 3.87

Realtek HD Drivers v.1.37
(These were released last week, btw)
(Codec Supporting: ALC880, ALC882, ALC883, ALC885, ALC888, ALC861, ALC260, ALC262)


And your right, Judas, the onboard Realtek HD is quite something, and keeps getting better after each driver release. I just wish Intel would go back to using it. Now they've switched over to Sigmatel, which I personally think doesn't sound as good as the Realtek HD.

[BWX]

Originally Posted by Tipstaff

Realtek AC97 Drivers version 3.87

[.

Not for ALC850 though right? it sure doesn't say it anywhere. I swear that site is about as moronic as Asus' when it comes to organization and thoroughness.