Weird sound issue with Mi-48 Kajman cannon

[scruffy 17]

Aloha :)

I need your help about an issue with the number of sound samples and the Kajmans cannon with HE ammunition.

A single gunship can crash my fps into the single digits when firing the canon using HE ammo. I'll still need to test if other guns cause this too, but it didn't appear in normal gameplay for others so far.

Sample mission

All other ingame settings except number of samples show no real difference, I drop from 200 to 2fps with everything turned off/lowest/50% sampling when the gunships let go.

This is an extreme test, but using this I can set the maximum sound samples allowed in the audio settings to 48 without getting the extreme stutters. I did other tests where I had to go down to maxSamplesPlayed=32;

With higher settings a single Kajman cannon with HE will drop fps to 2, as soon as they run out of HE and start using AP it's back to "normal". They still drop the fps by a significant amount, but it stays playable.

Sound settings in Windows: normal speaker as default set to stereo, driver settings 2 channels, no difference between speakers or headphone setting, all mixer/effect/dolby features off

Driver is the most recent one for my soundcard Asus Xonar Essence STX, version 7.12.8.1794. Older versions weren't installed, all drivers from it's predecessor long cleaned, onboard sound or HDMI sound drivers never installed.

Rest of the system: i5 2500k, 8GB RAM, Radeon 7970, Windows 7 64 and Arma 3 on SSDs

A friend with a similar system (GTX 670, different Asus Xonar model) tried the same test for me and while he notices a 10fps difference between high and low sample settings, he never drops much below 30fps and never has the extreme stuttering I get.

So, feel free to try for yourself and please comment if you have any idea what could cause this.

[scruffy 17]

For future reference: I tried again today, can't reproduce the problem anymore.

No idea what did it, things I know that changed: A3 patches of course, new graphics driver 14.4 beta, changed back to X-Fi Music soundcard.

[Heinrich Kramer 172]

According to BI, there was a bug relating to this issue in the 1.18 Version wich got hotfixed yesterday.

[L3TUC3 25]

No, this seems to be a hardware/driver related issue with sample sources and high rof cannons. The fixed issue was MP only, I still encounter it in SP with sample sources over 32. My X-Fi card is supposed to handle 96 but lags out when there's explosions from HE cannons like the wipeout and tigris/cheetah are going on.

Edit:

Dropping the sample rates in windows significantly reduces the amount of lost fps in these cases. Where I would drop to 1 fps when firing the GAU8 in the wipeout, I now have a pretty steady 20+. I think that means that sound processing is offloaded to the cpu...

It looks like my particular card, the X-Fi Xtreme Audio, is just very very shit at hardware acceleration. Looks like I'll be buying a new sound card.

Edited May 8, 2014 by L3TUC3