Sound problem?

[OMEGADRACE]

Whenever an enemy (not a friend) makes a sound, be it grunt, footstep or swinging of their weapon, the game pauses for a split second. Normally this is kind of bearable in one on one circumstances, but more than that and it gets a little bit ridiculous. Would anyone have an idea of what is going on?

[Smooth613]

This is a symptom of a low-end, or onboard, audio device. What type of sound card do you have? Or do you have onboard sound?

 

To be sure this is related to your sound hardware first you need to disable sound completely and see if the problem goes away. Look for the following two lines in the Oblivion.ini in Documents\My Games\Oblivion.

bMusicEnabled=1
bSoundEnabled=1

Change both of those values to 0.

 

Does this fix the issue? If yes then it's a hardware issue and you can try lowering the number of sounds Oblivion keeps up with. Do so by adjusting the following variable in the Oblivion.ini. You can find the file in Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Oblivion.ini. Then search for the following line.

iMaxImpactSoundCount=32

Try changing that to 16 or even 8 and see if that helps. If not you will need to upgrade hardware most likely. When you have onboard sound the CPU has to process all of the sounds along with everything else that's going on. With a CPU that's already taxed by the game itself this can be enough to put it over the top and cause performance issues. You can try tweaking other settings to relieve the CPU of some processes to free up time for it to handle sounds.

 

Good luck!

[OMEGADRACE]

I should have mentioned that I had already tried with both settings off, and it did fix the issue while lowering the maximpact sounds didn't.

 

Funny how it only started doing this once I re-enabled the music. Making a new .ini didn't help either.

[OMEGADRACE]

Surprisingly, after messing around with some stuff, I got it smoothed out properly. It turns out I needed Whispered Feet MAX.

Thanks for your help anyway.

[Nightaria]

Disable ALL sounds?! You kidding right?;D

 

OMEGADRACE, what a sound card/chip you have?

If Realtek integrated: Install "3D Sound Back"

 

This can help:

go to oblivion.ini and mod this strings:

bDSoundHWAcceleration=1

bUseSoftwareAudio3D=0

both to 0

iMaxImpactSoundCount=32

to 24.

Edited December 12, 2010 by Nightaria

[GetOutOfBox]

Disable ALL sounds?! You kidding right?;D

 

OMEGADRACE, what a sound card/chip you have?

If Realtek integrated: Install "3D Sound Back"

 

This can help:

go to oblivion.ini and mod this strings:

bDSoundHWAcceleration=1

bUseSoftwareAudio3D=0

both to 0

iMaxImpactSoundCount=32

to 24.

 

What is with you and making random posts restating something someone else already said, but in a manner implying that you're somehow adding something new to the thread. You just said exactly what Smooth613 said, except you just explained the instructions in less detail. Way to go.