Video and audio desynchronized in video game cutscenes

Question

So lately I've been having some weird issues in games. The games run fine until a cutscene appears. When that happens the video start going faster than the audio. I don't think the audio is going slower than it should be, since it doesn't sound choppy or distorted. So the video starts going ahead of the sound, and usually finishes before the sound, so the last part of the audio gets chopped off. I got this in Mass Effect (for this one it happens in the conversations as well, not just the cutscenes), Dead Space, Bully, PoP Forgotten Sands, and some others (which I can't remember exactly right now). I play most of my games through Steam if that's any help, but PoP, for example I played outside it so I'm not sure it's because of it (I found some people on some forum suggesting that Steam might be the culprit, but it doesn't seem to apply)

My system is a Core i7 920, with a Asus P6T SE motherboard, a Radeon HD 5850 video card, and 6GB of RAM. I'm on Windows 7 Pro x64. I updated both video and audio drivers and it didn't help.

Any insight on how to solve this would be appreciated.

Update:
So, I uninstalled the drivers and let windows install the device on its own. I had no more realtek manager, just some options in the sound part of control panel. I retested in Mass effect and Bully (these are the two games that I have handy and can easily test against). I then installed an older version of the drivers and tested some more. Mass effect seems to have the problem no mater what I do (maybe it's something different than in the other games). In Bully I get the following effects for the following options (with both Windows default drivers, and realtek drivers):

• Stereo, full-range speakers unchecked: this works ok, the video seems synchronized with the audio, at most a few ms between them.
• Stereo or 5.1 Surround, full-range speakers checked: Same as before, video runs faster than audio.
• 5.1 Surround, full-range unchecked: this seems to switch the problem around, now, the audio runs faster than the video.

I don't really want to play games in Stereo mode, but I don't care about the full range thing (I'm pretty sure my speakers aren't full range anyway). But if I have the 5.1 surround system, I'd prefer to actually use it, instead of setting it to stereo.

Answer 1

I managed to fix it. It seems it is indeed a processor thing. The motherboard came with this little program called EPU-6 engine, that gives you four profiles for the CPU frequency/power consumption. It's meant to help you underclock the CPU when not used, to conserve energy and thus help the environment. It has 4 profiles, Max power saving, Medium power saving (both underclock), High performance (normal clock), and Turbo (overclock). It also has an auto button, which switches profiles based on the applications running. That's the option I used, and it set the Turbo profile in games, and that was causing the problems. If I manually, switch to High performance, the problem seems to be fixed. (Found the solution thanks to this Forum question )

Answer 2

First try different settings in the advanced tab of your speaker configuration, then try older drivers.