Stuttering sound + exit to Windows trouble

[drunknmunkey666]

Stuttering sound + exit to Windows trouble

Hey guys!

I've started my first playthrough a couple of days ago (lvl 28 atm, swordsman)..
I noticed two bugs so far:
1) Sound starts to stutter and sound robotic, always begins in dialogs/cutscenes - a restart of the game solves it (until next time). Can play for anywhere between 30 mins - 1-2 hours before it starts stuttering.
2) Game just exits sometimes, and returns to launcher. Has happened maybe 6 times on my playthrough.

I got:
Q6600@2,4 GHz CPU
3 GB RAM
Asus GTX560ti@980 MHz/4600 Mhz graphics card
M-Audio Firewire 1814 sound card
Windows Vista 32bit

I have done the 3gb mem-switch thingie, because it solved crashes with TW1 when I played through that ...
I remember others having the same issue with sound, but that was related to a specific brand of headphones/sound cards AFAIR (Gxx or something) - mine is an M-Audio.

Is there any solution to these problems?

 

[tommy5761]

The crashing back to desktop may be a heavy overclock on your video card even factory overclocked cards are subject to crashing .
The clock settings for a standard GTX560 Ti are
Core clock - 822
Shader clock - 1645
Memory clock - 2004

 

[drunknmunkey666]

Mine is set to 900+4200 from the factory, but I found stable settings at 980/4600 (used Furmark for 20 mins, never got above 90c).. If the CTD is a overclocking-problem, shouldn't I get a "driver shutdown" message in Windows?

 

[tommy5761]

Mine is set to 900+4200 from the factory, but I found stable settings at 980/4600 (used Furmark for 20 mins, never got above 90c).. If the CTD is a overclocking-problem, shouldn't I get a "driver shutdown" message in Windows?

Not necessarily . A driver reset error that causes game crash is different than game crash by using overclocked cards .

Also look here mostly at #22 and #25

 

[drunknmunkey666]

#22:
I won't do that, I use my sound card for making music quite often, and it never ever caused any trouble in any software, so it shouldn't be a problem using accelerated features..

#25:
It seems the only thing in this FAQ that I haven't tried, is lowering texture memory size.. Hmm.. My card is a 1 GB one, shouldn't that be able to keep up with a 600 mb memory budget? .. But I will try the next-highest setting tomorrow

Thanks for your help so far, I return when I've tried the texture-thing!
The sound-stuttering I just have to live with I think .. Save game -> restart game = not as annoying as a CTD LOL

 

[GuyNwah]

#22:
I won't do that, I use my sound card for making music quite often, and it never ever caused any trouble in any software, so it shouldn't be a problem using accelerated features..

Some levels of sound acceleration just aren't reliable in some games. You can change the setting in dxdiag easily enough, and change it back just as easily.

"Never caused any trouble in any software" and "shouldn't be a problem" fall into the category of Famous Last Words. These are assumptions you should always question when you are doing heavy troubleshooting.

Popping and buzzing are the usual indications that a game is confounding your sound acceleration, and reducing it may be the only way to get the game to perform reliably. You may end up having to reduce it just for the one game. Unfortunately, DirectX doesn't have per-executable profiles the way, say, nVidia Control Panel does.

Also, M-Audio devices have latency and buffer size settings that you can control. Increasing these is a recommended means of reducing stutter and popping.

There is also the possibility that the game is just eating so many resources that the sound device doesn't get serviced in time. M-Audio has reported this as a problem when you are running a high-performance graphics card. Unfortunately, their suggestion to turn down 3D settings on the graphics card will not help your game run better

 

[drunknmunkey666]

Ah yeah, my card got a control panel - I already tried setting the ASIO+WDM buffer size to 512 instead of 256, but to no avail ... Would really hate it to go any higher, as that's too much latency for making music :/
But perhaps I should try 1024 and see if the problem disappears, so I at least know what the issue is!

EDIT:
My TW2 settings are now as follows:
Texture downscaling: none
Texture memory size: large
Shadow Quality: ultra
Number of shadowed lights: ultra
LOD distance: far
Bloom: enabled
Light shafts: enabled
Anti-aliasing: enabled
Blur effects: disabled
DOF - gameplay: disabled
Vignette: enabled
Wet surfaces rain effect: enabled
SSAO: enabled
Motion blur: disabled
Cinematic DOF: enabled
DOF - cutscenes: enabled
Dangling objects limit: disabled
Ubersampling: disabled
Vertical sync: enabled
Decals: high spec