Sound pops / distorted sound - nVidia driver issue

Another interesting topic :
3A: Configure NIC’s Advanced Settings
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=727946014

Still no latency issues here on drivers other than the 461's

 

The titanium is a native PCIE (HDA) version of the emu20k/CA20K2 iirc, MSI's only work on it when using the windows HDA driver, not the Creative WDM driver.

The Xtreme music CA0110-IBG has a bridge, but its not a true XFI.

Xonars are all bridged.

 

Thing is, Asus soundcards hasn't seen updated drivers in many years the last I looked.

I was once sorely tempted to purchase the STX II 7.1 back in 2018/19 then I found out the drivers were 3 - 4 years old. This was when I decided to go external so I don't need to be faffing about with sound drivers.

2015 is the last driver for Xonar DGX on Windows 10.
2019 for Xonar SE, Essence STX II
2020 for Xonar AE, Strix Soar, Strix Raid DLX, Strix Raid Pro

Most of the other models has what looks like it has been updated for 1903/9, 20H2. Just like what happened to my Auzentech X-Fi Prelude when 1903 hit. The sound stopped working.

The only way around it was to disable driver signing which seemed like a very cheap hack.


When cards stop or end up getting poor updates, I don't see the point in the hassle.

Creative I'm not fond of their drivers either, or their support. They've proven this.

 

22 ‎June ‎2016 is the latest for my model, I think a lot of people use onboard now with others external

 

Using latest Creative Driver, MSI can be enabled but no sound - will try the Windows HDA driver, thank you!

 

Sounds like we agree it may be related to interrupt configuration.

For reference my config. I have no popping.

Driver 461.81
Intel NIC on adaptive interrupts. (very likely meaning its using no moderation or very little 99% of time).
Xonar D2X soundcard. Hand picked driver with least reported issues, the driver situation is a mess and I plan to replace this sound setup.
RTX 3080.

My nvme, SATA, 3080, USB, NIC are all using MSI interrupts and also by default.

Soundcard is using legacy, and its confirmed these old xonar cards have to use legacy. Luckily most other hardware is using MSI.

 

First off: Creatives' driver support absolutely sucks. The Audigy 4 I had was great once I found a good set of drivers, until 64bit DMA and greater amounts of RAM became a thing, that is.
Just needed to get that out of my system.


As for the popping issue at hand: I found that along with nVidias' drivers, Realtek is very much engaged in this problem as well. Some drivers are fine, others pop fairly often (especially under load).

For nVidias drivers i'm using 460.89, as that seems to be the latest "crackle'n'pop-free" driver for me, although 470.05 comes close (only a tiny crackle I've been able to notice when loading the desktop). 470 has the RDR2 issue though, so I rolled back again.
461.51 was pretty good performance wise, but unfortunately induced popping. 461.72 was a lot worse on popping, and a little worse on frametimes.


Now, I have a quite an old system at this point, though the mobo (ASUS Maximus VII Ranger, Z97, with an ALC1150 codec i believe) used to be pretty high-end, and with EMI-shielding on the PCB (it helps).

Recently I was trying some new sound drivers (not official, as you might imagine), and found that 6.0.9071.1 (I believe it was. If not, it was 6.0.1.9000.1 - both HDA, though UAD drivers certainly aren't exempt) popped quite frequently. Really bothersome level of frequency honestly.
I was using 460.89 at this time as well, so that's how I found reason to suspect Realtek drivers to be part of a bigger problem.


Right now I'm using 6.0.9116.1 for my sound, 460.89 (still) for my GPU, and I have yet to hear a pop or crackle, and I hope it'll stay that way until it's time to move on.


It seems quite challenging to find newer drivers to keep up without screwing up the ecosystem anymore.
My brother had to update the drivers for his iGPU - which had worked fine for multiple iterations of Win10 previously - just because Firefox suddenly started crashing. Updated the drivers using Snappy Driver Installer, and no issues since.


I understand we're running legacy hardware on several points, but with prices and availability as they stand we'll problaby be stuck with it for quite some time.

Anyway, just attempting to add more data and another perspective to the discussion. And yeah, I'm aware of potential popping when sample rates are changed, so that which I observed falls under abnormal.

Edit: I use MSI mode where possible.

 

Added the 'Dma64BitAddresses' key with the 'Reg_Binary' value 1 to the relevant registry entry for the 'Creative Titanium XFi PCIe' card, in my case under 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e96c-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001\Settings'

Also checked the 'PowerSettings' key for the 'Creative Titanium XFi PCIe' card and amended keys to rule out any drops due to powersetting, in my case under
'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e96c-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001\PowerSettings'

Note, the powersetting for the X-Fi really shouldn't be an issue, just there to rule it out i.e may be similar to an older problem with some 'Nvidia HDMI Audio' drivers (fixed a while back).

As usual, Intel NIC 'Interrupt Modulation' settings adjusted and the system has fast boot etc disabled.

I'll keep the 460.79 drivers installed for gaming sessions over the next few days just to check that the registry edits had no negative impact, then will install and try the 461.72 set again.

Thanks again!

EDIT: HKEY

 

For sound I was considering soundblaster G6, but that seems to have driver complaints as well, and I prefer non shared line in/toslink. So I can use ps3 and ps4 without swapping audio in cables round.

My thinking is external usb sound is way to go.

 

Alright,

and hey, if you want you can post the performance trace on here as well and i can dig into it with WPA, nvidia otherwise tell you what they found or fixed.

 

By pops do you mean also on twitch?I've been noticing occasional pops/crackling on some streams.It's mostly subtle and not every streamers seems to have it.

 

Posted this in the driver thread.

465.89 DPC latency is on par with 460.79 and 457.51, had DPC latency issues with most 461.xx drivers but that could be my system. Windows updated to 19042.906 just before installing the driver.

465.89 on my aging system ( Intel 2600K CPU, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 6GB GPU, Creative X-Fi Titanium PCI-E audio ) is a good overall driver.

Thanks to @Astyanax @Neil79 @EdKiefer for the tips, support and guidance, really appreciated.

 

I'm glad that something was tweaked in the driver and it has improved it for you, theres always the possibility that everyone had the issue but the way latencymon works doesn't actually flag any issues because of other hardware circumstances, and no presentation of audible or visible issues.

 

Oh, I had forgotten all about this thread, but I might as well share a recent discovery I made of another source of sound crackling (and worse): networking hardware.
I'm still on 460.89, but that's not the focus here.


Up until quite recently I had a slow 8/1Mbit/s ADSL connection which has now been replaced by a 500/500Mbit/s fiber connection. Quite a jump indeed, but as it turns out not without its share of issues.
Before upgrading I experienced no obvious issues relating to networking, not even at Gigabit-speeds over LAN.

Strangely, after the internet connection upgrade I started having random crackling just doing lightweight things like watching Youtube videos, as well as more heavy duty things such as downloading (anything) at high speed.
Things got progressively worse the longer my system was up, eventually leading to severe mouse lag/stutter; both when downloading from a remote source, as well as copying files from a local (LAN) source, neither of which I had ever experienced any problems with before the Internet connection upgrade.

The problem only got more pronounced as I replaced the last of my mechanical drives with another SSD in search of silence (goal achieved; though irrelevant ), all of which obviously puts more strain on my aging system.


After a fair bit of research and troubleshooting things seemed to be pointing towards my integrated NIC: an Intel I218-V. As such, I ordered a cheap PCI-E NIC (TP-Link TG-3468 (v4)) in order to put my theory to the test.
I installed the new NIC (along with the latest available drivers for the RTL8168E), and it took maybe a little bit longer than before, but the problems eventually resurfaced. Frustrating.

Even more troubleshooting later, now using mbk1969's MSI tool (3.0) and Device Manager I noticed that whilst the old Intel NIC only supports 1 MSI interrupt and 2 RSS queues, the TP-Link NIC supports MSI-X with up to 4 interrupts and 4 RSS queues, but by default it too was set to use only 1 interrupt.
So, I set it to the maximum of 4 interrupts, rebooted and.. nothing. No more crackling. No more cursor lag. Not even after more than 24 hours of uptime, whereas it previously took no more than half that time before the system was virtually unusable.

It has been about a week since then and everything still works as it should.


In the wake of all of the above I kept digging for a bit as I was curious as to what the difference between MSI and MSI-X is, and why it made a difference. That's when I found this: https://www.intel.sg/content/www/xa/en/support/articles/000017506/network-and-i-o.html

Thanks for cheaping out on us, Intel (and in extension motherboard manufacturers).


That's it for my rambling. Hopefully this helps someone else keep their hair.

 

Can that be changed from Device Manager or how did you do it?

Does this have an effect if interrupt moderation is disabled, any idea?

 

For interrupts I used mbk's MSI tool found here: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/w...ge-signaled-based-interrupts-msi-tool.378044/

The RSS queue setting can found through Device Manager -> Network card -> Properties -> Advanced Tab.

Note that not all NIC's have the same abilities or features exposed.

Edit: Disabling interrupt moderation appeared to affect my internet connection speeds negatively.
The TP-Link NIC only has an on or off setting for this though, meanwhile the Intel NIC has a few different ones (I used the default "Adaptive" setting when testing).

 

you sure you not thinking of xtreme audio? that card emulated the xfi functions but the extreme music which I remember buying when it came out has the hardware xfi chip.

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-and-an-x-fi-fatal1ty-fps.17012/post-23031998

 

Same issue here....
Doesnt care...as only during POST it happens once

 

You're right, i had misremembered the card that got a PCIE release.

Xtreme Audio PCI Express has the CA0110 instead of a CA0106

 

I have found a fix for sound popping using earc and windows 11 with geforce 20 30 and 40 +

First you have to clear display cache in windows 11/ windows 10 this is so garbage that it stores that many profiles, along with the sound profiles attached to them. They retained all audio and display settings. To clear it google how to clear windows display cache.

After that has been completed then you must MUST change your sound to 16-bit or 24-bit 96000 or higher. After this rollback the NVIDIA hd driver to something prior like 2021 Dec or Jan 2022.

Once that has been completed test it out and see if it vanished. This worked for me my setup is as follows LG OLED C1 LG OLed CX and S95B



S95b is connected via e-arc directly to receiver for sound only. Then I have hdmi to pc directly connected via graphics card the other two monitors are display to hdmi 4k60 while 4k144 is s95b all working in tandem with no more issues. BOTH nvidia and Microsoft really should fix this garbage. I was going insane trying to figure this out. This worked for me does not mean it will work for everyone.

Also my s95b is set to e-arc and passthrough, in windows set it to full range and stereo to enable passthrough in windows. SO now bitstream with dolby atmos and dts-hd works perfectly.



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