Hi guys. Opf noob here. I picked up the GOTY edition a week or so ago. At first, I was extremely underwhelmed. I've got an OK system that certainly far outstrips the box requirements (P4-1.8/512 megs of PC2100/128meg GF4Ti4200) but I found the performance even after making some adjustments to the settings to be terrible. I was getting sub-20's framerates and frankly, the game looked like crap (I've been playing alot of Call of Duty recently and Ofp looking the way it did @ 20fps or less was a bit of a shock to the system - even allowing for the added depth of the sim). I was pretty much ready to pack it up and trade it in on Ghost Recon or something. But, I gave it a bit more time, did a bit more tweaking and things did improve greatly. I still get pretty low framerates (if I use the big "Battlefields" scenario as a test, I get say 12fps at the start, up to 20 or 25 as units get whittled down) but the general image quality is much improved and the game actually looks quite attractive (I'm running @ 1024x768x32, normal terrain, 4096 textures, actually mostly pretty high graphics settings and I'm running quincunx fsaa). Opf is one of those sims that remains fairly playable even at quite low fps. So, I'm starting to sink my teeth into it and am quite enjoying the depth and details. Very impressed with the AI and the scale of the environments.
Anyway, more to the point here - I unfortunatly am saddled with the dreaded SBLive (Value no less) sound card and am experiencing the BSOD crashes and the distorted engine sounds. In fact, these issues are by no means limited to Opf. I've been playing Grand Prix Legends for years and it too suffers from SBLive/WinXP sound bugs - similar issue actually, the sound gets distorted under certain circumstances. The suggestions I've heard for solving the GPL problem are the same as what I've been reading here and usually either don't work all the time or cuase other performance issues that basically are just as bad as the distortion itself. Running with the "hardware acceleration" enabled in the game (Opf that is)stops the bsods, but cuases the distorted engines so its a bit of a phyrric victory really. At some point along the way when I was trying to solve the problem in GPL I found a set of Audigy drivers that actually cracked the SBLive security
and basically allowed you to install the audigy drivers on the SBLive card thus giving you the various bug fixes and sound improvments therein (apparently, the hardware on the two cards is actually the same, they just limit the performance of the SBLive cards). Anyway, I installed those and while it did seem to give me better overall sound quality and improved performance, it didn't solve the specific distortion issue. :rolleyes:
Before I left for work this AM, I tried something else. Perhaps some of you who are also having the problem might want to give it a try too to see if it helps. First, set the hardware acceleration on the card itself (found in My Comp -> sound & vid devices -> Speakers -> Advanced -> Performanve tab iirc) to "Standard" rather than "Full" acceleration. Then, turn the in game Hardware Acceleration back on (if you had it off) and try it out. I didn't have much time to test it but I started up a couple of missions and played for a bit - even took a spin in a truck - and the distortion didn't happen so maybe it helps to do it this way. I hate the annoying distortion, but running without hardware accel and putting up with bsods isn't much of an alternative...
