I noticed I am losing about 15-20% off my framefrate in FS2002 when I hit 'Q' and have the sound enabled. As soon as I hit 'Q' again and turn off sound, my fps goes up 15-20%.I have experimented with low sound quality and other sound settings in both FS2002 and DirectSound to no avail. I assumed that the SB Audigy would take some load off the CPU; I think the 15-20% fps drop is excessive. I have a SoundBlaster Audigy MP3, WinXP, on a homebuilt rig (1800 mhz, 512 Corsair RDRAM, etc.) I have the latest WHQL drivers from Creative; (new ones are pending I believe, the beta driver link posted on Tom's Hardware has been removed). Is this 15-20% frame drop with sound normal? Or is there something wrong?My apologies up front if this topic has been re-hashed before...

I have hashed this topic quite a bit. Have you tried running Audio Winbench 99 to check for your Audigy's CPU use? Try it and see what you are getting. Have you moved the sound acceleration in DirectX down to Basic? This will help some if you have been having it at Standard or Advanced.I would start with Winbench 99. It sounds like you may be a bit steep. My onboard audio chip didn't have that much fps, and now my Audigy II has allowed sound to have virtually zero fps hit.Noel

Hi Mace, This was an early problem in FS2002 that was solved for most people by going into DXDIAG and turning down the sound acceleration setting. Try setting to "basic".Hope this helps! dek

I've often pondered this subject. I can't understand how turning acceleration down would increase performance. You'd think that off loading the sound on the hardware would decrease CPU usage and net a gain in framerates.Could anyone explain this to me, please?Cheers,Glenn

I have noticed the same thing, I have a "Sound Blaster Live! Value" It sounds very good and does a good job, but when I ran FS, I would get around 11-12 FPS I would then turn the sound off and I would get 15 or 16!, so then I turned sound acceleration down to Basic, then the frames would go up to about 12-13 with sound on, sound off it only went up 1 frame, but for other games, its the opposite, if the sound acceleration is Basic, the game is slower so I end up going back and turing it to Full Acceleration and it makes the other games smoother.EDIT: Does it make a difference if I am using the default Win XP drivers for my sound card?

Glenn, I believe what's happening is you are tapping into advanced sound processing features of DirectX when you increase acceleration. So with little or no acceleration, you get little or no additional processing overhead, if you get me drift.Noel

Makes sense, Noel. I guess the best bet is to simply try different settings with different software and see what's best.Thanks for the reply,Glenn

I dont understand why you think runing sound should not effect performance.Really its another task that the pc has to deal with.What you should notice is lower end soundcards or some onboard audio will effect framerate more then somthing like an audigy, they rely more upon the cpu for sound processing..I dont think ur gona avoid having a framerate hit, its another thing that takes some cpu useage.

I'm already running "basic" sound accel in DXDIAG.My belief is that a sound card has a cpu of its own to handle sound, and one of its reasons for its existence is to lessen the workload of the cpu. Kind of like a gpu, but for sound. Yes, sound IS another thing for the cpu to handle, but still, I feel I'm getting too high a framerate cut with a soundcard I spent $100+ for last year. If the SB Audigy can't handle things, I will have to find something that will. I used to run a Diamond MonsterSound MX300 and it was great, but wouldn't work with XP and was getting dated anyway.I ran WinBench and ran the DirectSound tests and got 86 to 95% cpu usage on all of the tests. How does this square with anyone else?