Why do my games stall with the sound on?

directX %26amp; Open GL games oscillate between decent and poor frame rates when the sound card is enabled.

The drop to poor frame rate appears to be triggered by entering an area where several simultaneous sounds are being played.

When the sound card is disabled the frame rates remain constantly at a good level of performance.



Happens in all games new and old, such as:

Deus Ex 1

Doom 3

Oblivion

Swat 4



Spec:



On board sound card disabled in BIOS, replaced with Audigy below to try and fix problem.



All drivers un-installed and reinstalled with most up to date versions.



RAM: 1Gb

CPU: Intel Pentium 4, 2800 MHz

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256Mb AGP

Sound card: Creative Audigy LS Audio Processor

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8S661FXM-RZ



The full spec of the PC can be found here: http://www.solarsplace.com/temp/report.htmlWhy do my games stall with the sound on?
Good job on narrowing down the problem to the sound card. Certainly an unusual situation.



So with the on board sound disabled and the audigy enabled, things are slow?



What about with the audigy disabled and the on board sound enabled?



You've mention the drivers being up to date - a good thing - is directX up to date aswell? Most likely, since I'm pretty sure oblivion uses dx9.0c.



Have you got any programs that play with the sound's output? My onboard sound came with some software to make all the sounds echo, sound underwater, sound bassy etc. Maybe you have something similar and it's causing the problem?



Definitely a weird situation. Good luck!