Talsworthy

O I ALSO HAVE THE XFI EXTREME GAMER 

Hey all, this has become a huge problem for my friend. He has an ATI HD4770 and 2 gigs of DDR2 ram so the game runs equally on high and low graphical settings. The issue is that he has a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz processor and a built in soundcard on an ASUS board. Whenever lots of units come to the screen and lots of sound effects are going on he goes from 5 to -1 Simspeed.  Checking the forum the /nosound command line completely fixes the problem and makes the game run perfectly.  Now though, he is looking into buying a new soundcard to figure this sucker out.  My understanding is that onboard soundcards put a lot of load on the CPU, having only a singlecore he needs a soundcard that will offload all those excessive 3D sound effects from the processor.  The damn internet isnt really helping me, nobody seems to think that sound could ever lag a game on any general forum. My question is, do all sound cards have APU's (Audio processing units)? and when focusing on a 2 speaker configuration in which simspeed of demigod is the main concern, what should he buy? I was looking at these 2:

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX10326(ME).aspx   I liked how this soundblaster is a recognizable brand, but it doesnt make any mention of a APU in the specs which... is a problem. It might be assumed but I have no way of knowing which APU's are supperior to others and this is the main concern!  Anyway here is the second choice:

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX24907(ME).aspx  Significantly more expensive and I dont recognize the brand, it makes direct mention of its sound processing unit though so that is good.

What card do we need to help offload the rediculous strain that Demigod puts on the CPU from sound? Really would appreciate some advice guys.  Also, I wish there was a way to dramatically reduce the level of complexity involved in the sound system, I dont need crazy 3D sound calculations, if units are attacking in a certain range just let us hear them, why isnt the low setting a significantly reduced Audio mode without complex distance/sound calculations..  Bothersome.

I cant believe there havnt been any tweaks developed or real solutions to this problem besides turning off your sound. No sound really sucks!

Well of course I have. I wouldnt register for a forum account and post in this very thread had I not tried everything suggested on this forum to fix the problem.  The solutions sound nice and technical but they dont actually do anything. I mean, yeah turning off movies seems to marginally improve performance, but clearly the issue is with the sound lagging the game. So no, none fo the suggested measures did anything to help.

However I will post about what DID help and got my friend from having max Simspeed of 3 to a min simspeed of -2  to having a max simspeed of 8 and a min simspeed of 3.  It was a weird solution but I came up with it when I noticed that there were audio drivers for his ASUS motherboard that were newer but meant exclusively for Windows Vista.  I wanted to try em but I knew windows vista was a clunky OS not very good at running applications in general.  Then I saw that you can get ahold of a legitimate copy of the Windows 7 RC (and subsequently buy it in a while when it launches).  So I installed that and installed the audio card drivers for vista (windows 7 isnt available yet for ASUS but Vista is backwards compatible).   So yeah. Thats all I did, guess what? dramatic difference. Now this rig should be running even smoother to be honest, the sound problem still exists and this is obvious especially when you listen to some of the sounds from the character selection screen (specifically the beast) in which the sound stutters and bugs out.  This rig deserves performance to never go below 5 simspeed, but windows 7 made a drastic difference.  I dont know if the OS is just straight up better or addresses what is being handled so poorly in the old XP install, or if the newer drivers intended for Vista simply had more updates made to them for games using the FMOD engine. God help me I dont know why it worked, but if you are having this problem honestly consider windows7. I am blown away that it performed so well, i hoped for a marginal improvement, I got a drastic improvement.  So I am a happy camper.

Also, ASUS is garbage and dont buy from them. If they did simply neglect the XP drivers then F-em, at any other rate, I wouldnt count on ASUS for soundcards, integrated or not. I'm going to recommend Intel and Gigabyte boards from now on.

I did try all of the things, the replacing of DirectX dlls seemed farfetched and unfortunately was not my problem. I am sure that a minority of people with issues do have corrupted DirectX dlls but the majority of people with this performance issue probably dont (it would be a lot of people with the same corrupt file).   So yeah, I have tried all the solutions and I didnt mean to imply that some of them werent advanced fixes, only that they were longshots that fix problems for only a minority of people with /nosound performance issues.

C'mon already we need a fix for this... PATCH PLZ

It really sucks playing with no sound because you sometimes completely miss when your fortresses are being destroyed...

Hey folks ...

Joining the unhappy ranks of the /nosound crew. Also an owner of a A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard running onboard sound (Nforce 4). Tried a lot of the solutions in here to no avail. Going to throw in the towel & return product.

End users with poor quality sound chipsets/sound cards may lower the sound quality to medium. This increases performance whilst you can enjoy the game with practically no audio "sacrifices".

As he, and me have said twice on here.. most of the times suffices with just that.

I am another that has the /nosound issue.  It works wonderfully without sound, but I WANT SOUND.  I want to hear as I tear foes apart, time after time.  

Could someone at least post that this is an issue being considered for the next patch?  

And Snoop: I have a friend that could use the valid key - we have a group of 4 that is considering delving it the game.

I have this problem as well (easiest way to test was in the Demigod selection screen, which had nasty sound looping). Similar to what others had, running under Windows XP SP3, I have an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard and a Creative Soundblaster X-FI ExtremeMusic sound card (all drivers current). In DXDIAG, I set the hardware accelleration of the sound from Full down to Basic. That didn't totally eliminate the problem, but at least made the game playable without totally degrading all the other programs I have that use sound card hardware acceleration (as using software emulation might have done).