Y500 Voice chat in game causing stutter: Possible Fix found

In some games, activating the voice chat causes the games performance to drop dead in the water and the audio to loop for a few seconds. To various degrees, this has gotten worse and better as the game updates.

The problem is that the Realtek driver is garbage. I have found posts going back to 2010 describing various issues (including the one that plagues the Y500 microphone voice chat in some games) with those drivers. The drivers are using the CPU for the "HD Audio" features. Sometimes, when you activate the Microphone, the drivers use way too much of the CPU. This denies the game the ability to run, which causes the game to stutter momentarily as it comes back to it's senses.

I have briefly tested a solution in Windows 8.0 to this problem. Uninstall the Realtek drivers and reboot. Windows will automatically install a Lenovo made driver from June of 2012 that seems to work just fine. No in game stuttering while using the voice chat in TF2 was observed in my testing, I haven't tested any other game.

While I'm on the subject of fixes, the newest WHQL 331 NVIDIA drivers are awesome. They completely fixed stuttering observed while in full screen mode in the Valve Source engine, along with a few other bugs I've run into, while at the same time improving performance in games.