Admit your wrong- allow hardware sound 2

At the risk of being repetitious, I'd encourage anyone affected by 2.2.0 sound issues to try out 2.2.3 on the PTR realms. We will continue to improve the sound engine post-2.2.3, and your feedback on any specific issues in the build under test can help us do that.

In Post 172 above, there are a number of issues described that are unrelated to hardware sound acceleration support, and may well be addressed by 2.2.3 - that's the motivation to invite people to try it.

Q u o t e:

Yes but you've still failed to comment on allowing an option for HW sound.

Correct. I have no information on that today.

The key point I'd like to share is that there were performance drops in 2.2.0 that are *completely unrelated* to hardware sound support, and for which we have fixes in 2.2.3.

In fact the nature of those bugs would have likely pulled down frame rates by an equal amount even if hardware sound was available in 2.2.0 - because there were unwanted delays occurring in the main game loop that does the rendering itself. This is a subtle distinction but I hope it helps underline why we are eager to get your feedback about our progress on 2.2.3.

Q u o t e:


So you're going also to tell me that my increase in CPU usage from the loss of hardware sound is from these "bugs" that were causing sound issues and fps drops?

A rule I hold handy in debugging is "never assume there is only one issue".

Software mixing uses a different amount of CPU time than hardware mixing, this is true. How much different depends on what CPU you have, how good the SW mixer is, what soundcard-DSP you have, and how good that DSP's driver is.

The far bigger issue in 2.2.0 did not involve software mixing overhead, it involved unwanted stalls of the main game loop for rendering, due to a conflict with sound file loading from disk.

Q u o t e:

I run a custom built PC with all high end equipment and XP and it ran flawlessly and sounded beautiful until 2.2. I am a patient and forgiving person so I will give Blizz the benefit of the doubt and hope that they truly are working to resolve this grievous error. If it isnt resolved in the next patch as they are promising I may indeed have to put serious consideration into whether or not I want to continue paying for a lackluster gaming experience.

The best thing you can do over the next few days is download the 2.2.3 PTR patch and try it on your system, so we have your feedback on our progress as soon as possible.

I hope everyone on this thread can take some time to come try out 2.2.3 on PTR - see you on the Test Realm forum if you have qualitative feedback about the new build that we can act on.

Fickle isn't a fair term to use. It's a large group with a diverse set of individual value systems.

I've asked for permission to post more details of what the real story is on hardware support but I do not get to make that call myself and I do not have a response in hand yet. So if people saturate the threads with repeated queries about hardware sound support and I appear to ignore them, that's why. The requests have been heard, the response is not yet available.

Q u o t e:
Hardware Sound Returned .... I do not accept sound being dumped onto my processor an upgrade, it is causing massive lag period. I happen to know that hardware can be enabled in your software engine, if your not going to return hardware sound then I would like a solid answer as to why this is a problem that never existed befor this crappy patch that has destroyed my gameplay considerably.

Have you tried 2.2.3 ? Turns out there was at least one bug which would slow down the main game loop that has nothing to do with hardware sound, which 2.2.3 addresses.

FWIW I have been test driving a copy of 2.2.3 as an invisible GM, visiting various active raid scenes and measuring the performance delta vs 2.2.0. In general those results have been quite positive with sound on and even running a large number of channels (64 or 128).

Performance can be very subjective, and some people run a lot more UI mods than others, but I feel we have made some good progress with 2.2.3 in terms of restoring a good chunk of the performance that was being impacted by crowded high-sound-activity scenes in 2.2.0.

Q u o t e:

there are some performance issues that are fixed in 2.2.3 that have to do with the transfers of the sound files from the hard drive during sound calls that stalls the main game engine. Yes, I know about those. Many don't have this problem because their computers have DMA enabled hard drives.

This turns out not to be the case. The issue in question had measurable impact on all configurations and was not directly IO throughput related, it was thread scheduling related (lock contention). Theoretically having an infinite speed hard drive would have made this issue less noticeable, very few of that type of drive are in use today.