Survey: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD

[Johny_B_Nasty]

Hello everybody,

I'd like to ask every owner of a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD whether they ever had troubles with their soundcard and Project Reality.

The reason I'm asking is that with my current setup (MOBO: Abit IP35-Pro and Creative Soundblaster ExtremeMusic) the highest sound effects setting doesn't work for me. I experience the sizzling/popping phenomenon.
Don't bother proposing me any solution; there isn't one because it's simply a matter of shitty hardware.

Cheers

[Psyrus]

Why do you want to survey everyone if:

Don't bother proposing me any solution; there isn't one because it's simply a matter of shitty hardware.

It seems a little pointless?

[LITOralis.nMd]

There was already a solution found using custom drivers on your audio card, there has been a pretty extensive conversation about this in our forum.

[LITOralis.nMd]

for PR the sound sounds more real, but for movie viewing and music listening the sound comes out to hard, somehow annoying.

don't forget to activate PR in Alchemy to fully get the EAX effects.

Here is the solution to your problems:
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f358-s ... river.html

[Johny_B_Nasty]

Thank you for your hints but I didn't ask for it. And no, that "solution" does not help my case.

Obviously no one cared to read the OP: does anybody have problems with his Titanium HD?

[Johny_B_Nasty]

Why do you want to survey everyone if:It seems a little pointless?

Heh, which part you didn't understand? I have X-Fi ExtremeMusic and I'm asking whether someone else has problems with a Titanium HD. Two differente things.

[Psyrus]

Heh, which part you didn't understand? I have X-Fi ExtremeMusic and I'm asking whether someone else has problems with a Titanium HD. Two differente things.

The part where you've already decided there is no resolution because it's 'shitty hardware' to quote yourself, so how would knowing that other people have the same hardware (and problems) help you in any way?

[Johny_B_Nasty]

The part where you've already decided there is no resolution because it's 'shitty hardware' to quote yourself, so how would knowing that other people have the same hardware (and problems) help you in any way?

I see that you're jumping to conclusions. However, if there are people with working Titanium HDs, all the while my ExtremeMusic does not, it may be worth a shot to try out the other soundcard. Again, it's a matter of two different hardware components.

[Psyrus]

I see that you're jumping to conclusions. However, if there are people with working Titanium HDs, all the while my ExtremeMusic does not, it may be worth a shot to try out the other soundcard. Again, it's a matter of two different hardware components.

My apologies, I misread your post. I understand now!

[LITOralis.nMd]

As you surmised, I do not own a recent Creative sound card, the newest one I own is a Audigy ES, circa idk how old it is now, ... 10 years?

But I am 100% certain the PAX drivers work for the TitaniumHD card, here is the direct quote on the tweaks the PAX drivers author uses on his own TitaniunHD card:

Audigy PCI XFI Titanium TitaniumHD are official out now Please read how installed. - Discussion

source:
Audigy PCI XFI Titanium TitaniumHD are official out now Please read how installed. - Discussion

-------------------

As you probably know, there are only four drivers available for your sound card, the official Creative package, the PAX drivers, the daniel_k drivers, and a fork of the daniel_k drivers (this last one I can not find a English language source for and I haven't looked into it in a few years).

So, have you tried the daniel_k driver pack 2.5 specifically made for your audio card?
source info and download link:
SB X-Fi series Support Pack 2.5 (10/25/2011)

Also, the PAX drivers do nothing more than adjust the .ini file settings, the daniel_k drivers are low level rewrites of the drivers for your audio card.

[sprint113]

As an regular PCI X-Fi owner, I've spent a good amount of time researching the various issues.

The PAX drivers that have been suggested are only a solution to the BSOD issue. Since the author of the PAX driver discovered the fix (which I haven't gotten around to finding out what it really entails), I don't think DanielK has released a new SupportPack/Driver for the XFi, and thus, from my experience, you will have BSOD issues.

When BF2 audio is in X-Fi mode, the OpenAL audio stream is directly routed to the X-Fi hardware (no ALchemy needed), bypassing the normal Windows audio stack (the reason FRAPS won't record audio if you were wondering). Switching down to Hardware goes back to the Windows audio stack to emulated sound since Windows doesn't support hardware audio anymore (and you lose the EAX advanced HD and other benefits of the XFi card). You might be able to partially get around this with ALchemy. Still, I feel that X-Fi mode is the optimal selection.

As far as sound quality goes, that setting seems to affect the quality of the sound samples (bitrate, sample rate) as well as the total # of simultaneous sound samples. From what I understand from various discussions about the X-Fi, the drivers never properly implemented the 64bit (>4gb) environment. I think that when BF2 is in X-Fi mode with Ultra sound quality, the maximum audio load generated, with the enhanced audio features of PR, more easily overruns the normal 4GB memory address. Throw in an incorrectly implemented 64-bit driver and you have the hardware trying to access invalid memory locations, resulting in the famous Page Fault in NonPaged Location (you see this issue with almost all other OpenAL games), or since the BSOD issue was fixed, corrupted sound samples.

My conclusion has been that the BSOD/Audio Corruption issue is the result of improper x64 driver implementation, and to just stick with audio in X-Fi mode, High audio quality until a third party (or Creative - hah!) releases a fix.

PS. If you look @ the files in the recently released Win8 drivers Creative recently released, all the files are still dated ~2010/2011 or earlier.

[Johny_B_Nasty]

@ sprint113
This is all highly interesting and, honestly, the only useful post. However, it doesn't change the fact that the sounds are corrupted (sizzling popping) in PR only (!).

I had a work around for this with Windows XP and Windows 7 before the Service Pack 1:
I used a a little programme called PCI Latency. I allocated a higher "time margin", that is, more time to my soundcard. Default setting is 32 ms (miliseconds) and by raising this value to e.g. 40ms or even the double, 64ms, I was sure that the game ran smoothly.
This is how I made sure that the soundcard had enaugh time to get all the data computed and send them all to the CPU any other hardware instance which was involved in making Project Reality sounds.

With Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, however, this programme wasn't allowed to work any more. I think it's some issue how Windows 7 SP 1 deals with not authorised drivers.

So, in conclusion: I've learnt quite a few interesting things while trying to iron this f*cking problem out and in the end Microsoft took a **** on me.
(PS No, no alternative drivers help.)