Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
 
Age of Conan freezes apparently sound related

After playing some more and finding out that Age of Conan still freezes on me half of the time that I use my Pillar of Infernal Flame combo, I searched high and low for suggestions on how to fix it. And one guy on the forums suggested to disable sound, a check box which is suspiciously marked with a mouse-over text saying "disable this if the sound system causes crashes". So I disabled sound, and played for hours without having a single crash.

I have a nForce 680i SLI onboard sound card with a Realtek chip, and before you ask, yes, it has the latest drivers. This is not a very exotic motherboard, and with onboard sound cards being quite good nowadays, there are lots of people without added sound cards around. This same sound card plays every other game I have without problems, only for Age of Conan I have to disable it to play. :(

Now my options are "play without sound", or "buy a sound card", both of which are equally unattractive. I would much rather have some option in AoC to turn of spell sound, and still get the other battle sounds, music, and voice overs. Anyone got an idea how to fix this?
Comments:
Is there an option turn off hardware acceleration? It's been known to fix problems in other games I've played.
 
Standard hint for sound problems:

Run dxdiag and under the sound tab scale back the hardware acceleration.

It doesnt solve all problems, but seems to work quite often.
 
Yeah, try the hardware acceleration tip Alfay suggests, thats fixed issues with friends Realtek driven machines before.

However ultimately, I would stay away from using Realtek on board sound and always plump for a separate sound card (X-fi preferably). It will take off some load from your CPU as well, and may actually make your machine perform better, as well as sounding great ;)
 
Ah, I remembered something with hardware acceleration, I just didn't remember that it was in dxdiag that you set that.

Anyway, I did some more experiments, and it turned out that it was the ambient sound, not the sound effects, that caused the crashes. Setting the ambience slider to 0% while leaving the other sounds on solved the problem, at least as far as Pillar of Infernal Flame is involved. I'll have a look around for a sound card this weekend, or next.
 
i have an x-fi sound card and these crashes happen to me since yesterday (may 19th) changes in dxdiag did not help

i also had the impression, that it only happens when i am near or fighting against scorpions oder spiders. i have no clue about sounds and how they work with the hardware, so no idea if a certain damaged sound file can cause such crashes *shrug*
 
My friend is also having audio problems where zoning sometimes cuts off all sounds until he restarts the game.
 
680i is actually a fairly bug plagued chipset.

Turning on/off hardware acceleration is almost always a stop gap solution for a driver issue.

I would actually suggest in this case rolling back your sound driver to a previous version and see if that works.

If that does not work, but hardware acceleration being turned off does, then I'm not sure what to say :P
 
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