Audio issue causing lag?

[Jacks]

So I haven't played DCS for about 4 months due the terrible performance when looking in random directions even with no other units on the map.

 

Anyway in prep for the release of the viggen I thought I would have another go at trying to fix DCS despite wasting days, weeks and months previously.

 

Last night I was testing on my benchmark mission (mi-8 parking start at senaki-Kolki) and despite my medium to high settings, FPS still dropped from 60 to 32 when I looked towards the town. However at one point, the game crashed and my headphones went dead and the sound was suddenly played though my monitor. After this happened, I restarted DCS and played the benchmark mission and the performance had doubled with me achieving a solid and stable 60 FPS (no more constantly flicking between 59&64 FPS). I flew around the town and low over the trees and the FPS remained clamped at 60FPS.

 

This is the performance I am looking for but since then I have not managed to recreate the crash and so I am once again stuck with poor performance. After this event though i know my rig is capable of a solid 60FPS and so I am determined to find out how to permanently keep it in this high performance state. I am now exploring the possibility that sound is causing my performance issues.

 

I have tried disabling sound and updating audio drivers but tonight nothing worked. Any ideas?

Edited December 14, 2016 by Jacks

[BitMaster]

The difference between your High Definition Front Panel Audio and your Monitor speakers is as following:

 

The HD-FPA is driven by your onboard soundcard, which for DCS is usually plenty.

 

The Monitor speakers "MAY" be driven by your HDMI cable and thus NVIDIA driven or,

if you have no HDMI connection between GPU and Monitor it is driven by a standard 3.5" Stereo cable, just as your headphones. In that case it is ALSO driven by your onboard sound.

 

If, as you say, you had less-2-zero issues with the Monitor speakers I "assume" you are using an HDMI cable and HDMI also carries your sound. This means that the sound is processed by the Nvidia card/drivers and NOT by your onboard solution.

 

WHat does this mean and where dfoes this point us:

 

LATENCY ISSUE is what I assume is your culprit. The data used for sound need to travel across the board via PCI-Express lanes and pass at least the PCH part of your chipset.

That long walk across the board does not seldomly cause latency issues, interrupts misfiring

and other bad things if the layout and drivers involved cant handle it smoothly, like it does on baords where this is no issue at all, most dont have that issue but the same culprit causes many other bad things like USB errors and AHCI errors. Google is FULL of it and it resides more or less in the layout of the board !!AND!! how many onboard devices you are using and have enabled ( COM1, IR, Marvell IDE, etc...the usual things under "onboard devices".

 

Disable each and any device you dont use to free up IRQ's and lanes so routing data across the board has less red stop lights and free left lanes in casual language.

 

Switching to an Add-On PCI-Express based soundcard from Soundblaster or Asus may or may not solve it. It depends which lanes are being used by the devices involved and you will really have to read & understand the IRQ layout of your board, which is explained somewhere in the manual, at least Asus always has it.

 

Look for which PCI-E slot shares bandwidth and IRQ with other devices and make a better layout by disabling unneeded devices and inserting a new Soundcard into a slot that doesnt share ressources GPU, USB, COM, WLAN, LAN whatever your board offers.

 

YOu can try to move add-on cards around in slots if you have any in use or pull them to see if that solves it. Cards like ISDN cards for faxing, Raid cards, USB3.1 cards, etc etc...

 

 

check the latency problem in google, I think that is where your problem comes from what you described.

 

 

Bit

[Jacks]

Thanks Bit. I have disabled the integrated sound card in BIOS. After this the sound is payed through the monitor (HDMI) but I am still getting terrible performance.

[BIGNEWY]

Hi Jacks,

 

which bios are you using for your Z77AGD55 ?

 

If you are using a version before 1.8 which has Enhanced PCI-E display card performance, long shot thought I would ask

 

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/Z77AGD55.html#down-bios

[Jacks]

BigNewey, thanks just checked and I am running the most up to date version.