Static when graphics are being rendered

[Am0n]

Abit KT7-RAID
AMD Tbird 1.4ghz
ATI Radeon 8500 (newest certifeid drivers, not sure the version)
768 mb micron pc133mhz sdram
2 x 30 gig western digital cavier 7200 rpm RAID +0 (striped)
Sound blaster PCI512

Windows XP professional (DX8.1) (all critical updates)



This really doesnt pertain to AH since it runs just fine.

When certain graphics are being rendered i get static through my sound card. A good example is when i play mp3s with windows media player and its playing the visualisations the static distorion comes through with the music.

This was also happening with return to castle wolfenstein, but i fixed it there. the graphics card was sharing IRQs with a slew of thing, including but not limited to the sound card. In the bois i disabled IRQ sharing for the "VGA" and that forced the video card to have it own IRQ. This actually changed the whole routing table for the IRQ's. The only thing that shares IRQs with the video now is my network adapter. Before i made the changes there was 4-5 devices all sharing IRQ 11. After making these changes the static still exsisted in wolfenstein but i just set all the system settings in the game to default and then re-adjusted the graphics to my liking. At this point its running great.

Now i have the problem with windows media player only as far as i can tell, but its totaly related to graphical display. I should also mention that the media player skips, or misses parts of songs that are playing. This problem exsisted before the wolfenstein issue.

I havent really dug into this to much since i got sucked into a game of wolfenstein last night after getting it working right . I should also mention that when the visuals are turned off it runs just fine, there is not problems playing sounds when this is the case.

Tonight when i get home from work im going to try and download the latest PCI512 drivers from sound blaster and see if that does the trick.  But until then, if anyones had this problem before please let me know.

thanks in advance!

[JV44]

Hello....

I only can assume...

a) Maybe both cards share a interupt???

or

b) Are both cards direct slot members??? If so try to move them more appart each other (in a slot more away), maybe there are interferrence signals....

Andreas

[Am0n]

Ok heres the deal

I found last night that the static is not there anylonger but it is skipping frames in all forms of media.. while playing movies with any media player or mp3's with any media player and durring games, including AH it will skip ahead or miss frames of sound and video.


I have the latest drivers for my sound card from creative labs. I also have a newest version of the 4in1 drivers for my MOBO.


Theres 5 PCI and 1 ISA slots on the mobo, the sound card is in the very bottom slot, while the video card is in the AGP port (which is obvisouly at the top.) Theres is nothing in the 2 slots under the video adapter.



One thing that i have considered is the 4in1 driver i am using was just installed a few days ago. the problem just came about although i didnt notice that it was like this after i updated my drivers it very well could have done the damage.

[Am0n]

tried a older version of the 4in1 drivers (4.33 final) and still the same deal.

tried windowsXP default PCI512 sound drivers, problem still there.

ive searched all over the internet and several bbs's for some kind answer or idea and no deal.


Been fooling with is for some time and i see the static i mentioned before still exsist during video rendering of any sort.



Im drawing a blank here, any help would be greately appreitciated.

[SKurj]

There is a PCI latency patch out there somewhere for VIA chipsets... damned if i can remember where....

pm me with your email addy and I can send to you.  It may not help though.

I too have had occasions where my sound is distorted or crackly under XP.  At the moment its fine though....

I use an SBLive with the latest WDM's from the windows update site.

You are not alone with htis problem this seems to be a fairly large issue with XP and creative sound cards.

Under XP your vid card and sound card are sharing IRQ 9 i bet +Q  and I have yet to find a solution, perhaps someone can enlighten me.


SKurj

[Am0n]

thanks SKurj, but dont they have PM disabled? i'll try any how but i thought it was.

Thats one of the biggest problems i see with the advanced NT kernal that windows 2000 and windows XP use. It assigns 4-5 divices to a common IRQ. Before i knew that it was setup buy default buy the OS i tried moving the card to a different slot and when it didnt change IRQs even then i researched it and found what i said above to be true.

After i disabled IRQ sharing for the "VGA" (if you searcg for it in your bios i think it says "disable IRQ for VGA" to be exact) in BIOS setup it changed the whole IRQ routing table and assigned the devices to different IRQ's. The video shares IRQs with the network card in my PC after these changes, thats as good as it gets from that ive seen, But even then the problem is still there.

[mrsid2]

Amon you can find a useful little app from http://www.vcool.de

It will cool down your system AND set your PCI latencies right.

Abit KT7 is a pain in da butt with SB Live! I just couldn't get it to work. I changed motherboards and everything is fine and dandy now (KT266A)

You can get rid of IRQ sharing by disabling ACPI. Unfortunately the only certain way to achieve that is to reinstall OS with ACPI disabled.

[SKurj]

One other thing to try, reduce sound acceleration.

I am running XP with 4.37a's , 4.10AGP patch and the PCI latency patch
No static here, but i do recall having static problems... I just can't recall what it was that actually fixed it.


SKurj