Sound flickering causes in-game lags

Hey guys,

I posted into one of the threads some time earlier this month regarding the weird stuttering that occurred whenever I played certain games - mostly my GPU was crazily underperforming and I experienced lags each 1-3 seconds as I played, by far making it impossible to game and had me curse all day long.

Just recently I encountered sound flickering in watch dogs and some other guys had the same issue on various internet forums around what Google had to offer in its search. I managed to find out that in fact, the whole GPU trouble may actually be becaues of the soundcard (!!!!!). I turned off the audio devices in device manager, rebooted laptop and bang, NOT A SINGLE LAG!!!!

Comes down to...
a) both sound flickering and crazy gpu underperformance are caused by IDT soundcard
b) various uninstalling-installings of the audio drivers (and choosing different versions on the dell website) dont make no difference - still lags
c) I have no idea how to handle this anymore ))

Anyone knows a workaround for this one? One way people were vocal about is buying an external DAC and I already got one. Thing is that solution is making my machine unportable as I have to carry tons of things around with it.

 

I think the best thing to do would to do a complete reinstall of Windows etc.. You might also be overheating so what are your temps too?

 

I just had issues that seem similar you have. I could play 5-10min, then the massive lag kicked in (with audio crackling) for a minute and I could resume playing. After an half an hour it seemed the lag kicked in every minute or so.

I used MSI afterburner with the on screen display to monitor my temperatures in game and I noticed that when the lag kicked in, I saw either the GPU or CPU dropping to 100Mhz / 0.77Ghz resp. My temps maxed out at 103C for the GPU and 90 on the CPU.

After a repaste, the lag is gone and Im running at 50-60 cpu and 70-75 gpu. a repaste is relatively simple and cheap and there a lot of videos explaining how (just don't spread out the paste)

I've heard stories of soundcards causing lag, but no more than a few fps (like 3-5fps less).

 

Truth is, temps don't go crazy high for me. At least when I play dia3 I have no lags, whenever I start some other certain games - it appears. The other fact is - NO LAGS when audio devices are turned off.
Let's assume for a second that it's a heating problem. Then why does killing audio solve the lag even and if I run the game for 10-15 minutes there are no spikes? Again, the last repaste I did was only a year ago and it was done by a guy who knows his thing. I never got to play anything more than dota 2 for a long period of time up until recently.

Already done windows re, drivers re, etc. As I said, it seems that when I turn sound devices off, the problem disappears completely. Temps are also low, cpu max hits 80 *C while GPU averages 64 - 69 degrees on FULL load. 54 *C on low. Did a repaste a year ago so its not a problem either!