I own a Intel Core i5 760 CPU based PC. 16Gb of RAM, AMD Radeon HD 7850, Asus Xonar DSX audio card, and a Creative Sound Blaster Sigma headset (with USB audio device). It's just to enumerate all my audio devices. Once again:
- Realtek chip based on Motherboard (MSI P55-CD53). I almost never use it. It's now disabled from BIOS.
- Creative Sound Blaster Sigma USB audio device for headset.
- AMD Radeon HD 7850 (and HD 5670 before that) audio via HDMI
- Asus Xonar DSX audio via S/PDIF and DTS Connect
All drivers seem to be up to date so I must exclude the possibility that the driver doesn't work properly on Win8.
And no matter what audio device I use, I always get the same problems. The audio works fine for a while, then once every hour or so it gets totally interrupted for 0.5 seconds or so, then it continues for 0.5 seconds, then stops again, and like this for 3-4 seconds. It's very annoying.
The stream is not interrupted, it continues to play when it's not audible, so it's not a read buffer issue. Something like this:
00:00:00 - 00:54:14 - audible
00:54:14 - 00:54:15 - inaudible
00:54:15 - 00:54:16 - audible
00:54:16 - 00:54:17 - inaudible
00:54:17 - 00:54:18 - audible
00:54:18 - 00:54:19 - inaudible
00:54:19 - 02:15:07 - audible
then the pattern repeats itself
I surfed the net for solutions, but all links lead to dead ends. One solution I tried was running bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes
as administrator. It had no positive effect, but I have the subjective perception that the stutters became more frequent since I ran that.
Update
With LatencyMon I've discovered very high latency with most drivers. I searched more, and found it might be because of HPET, so I turned it off in BIOS. The latency improved for most drivers, but occasionally tcpip.sys
will give a 40ms latency, and that's where the audio stutters. I've updated to the latest network drivers, but unfortunately there aren't any for Windows 8 specifically, so I'm relying on compatibility with Win7.