[Gigabomber]

Just want to know before I work myself into choosing a modded 0404 with breakout cables over the chaintech.
Please only vote if you have played a decent amount of games via the emu's drivers.

Side note: not worried about surround, but i still want decent, playable sound.

 

[dano1122]

i had some occassional sound stuttering in half life2, not sure if that was the soundcard or my memory or gfx card.

 

[Cthulhu]

It gives me the total ****s in anything using directsound.

It's an aboslute pain in the arse actually for that. However, asio works fine, and I run a cable from my mobo's optical out to the emu for gaming.

Still VERY irritating though.

 

[Feanor]

I dont really game anymore, but I did not use the E-MU for it while I did. It would die in about a minute, then no sound. I have no idea why. But, onboard audio works fine for games.
EDIT: sorry, didnt notice one of the vote options

 

[ooheadsoo]

Anyone know if the digital output will pass through the stuff coming into the emu via analog? I'm wondering if I'll be forced to scrap the emu if games will no longer work because the emu won't pass through the sound from my onboard sound.

 

[Cthulhu]

Yeah it does - thats how I use my E-mu 1212m.

Edit: The e-mu is amazingly powerful in this respect, any input can be redirected to any output, not a problem.

 

[ReasonablyLucid]

The *only* game ive had problems with my 1212m on was halflife2. Every other game has worked just fine.

and I play a lot of games

 

[Asterix]

Get an Audigy 2 and run a digital cable to your E-mu. Plays through the opamps of the E-mu but uses the Audigy 2, which is a lot faster for games anyway. It's a little more money (to buy an A2 & E-mu vs. just E-mu) but it will actually work in games consistently instead of constantly failing, and the sound quality is pretty decent for games. It's not as nice as the E-mu's sound but it's faster (in terms of how much it taxes the cpu in games.)

E-mu never worked for me with CoD no matter what I tried, so I did this out of necessity....

 

[individual6891]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ReasonablyLucid The *only* game ive had problems with my 1212m on was halflife2. Every other game has worked just fine.

Before everyone thinks about not buying a card because of halflife2

[size=small]It is a generic problem within halflife2 and affects all EAX cards[/size]

 

[Sabbe]

Well the halflife2 problem is a different story, has nothing to do with soundcards. I found a way to fix it with some instructions from www.tweakguides.com. But that was when I had live.. now there's probably no fix for the problems I have with EMU 0404.

The thing is.. I play a lot of games and I know a bit about computers.. I've tested everything reasonable and my conclusion is that the emu drivers directsound is WEAK. I can play any older games without trouble and I even managed to make ut2004 work without trouble (trouble being sound cutoff).

It's all about stutter. Stutter happens when computer's memory is full and it starts to use virtual memory and free the memory. That's when my cutoff happens, pci latency settings or any priority settings matter close to ZERO.

I have "tweaked" my game settings so that my 512MB memory can manage but some newer games really make it hard. I don't play that many games at the moment.. action quake 2, starcraft:bw, ut2004 and rome: total war. The quake and the starcraft never gave me problems.. ut2004 I got working after lowering the settings a bit for it to work without stutter with 512mb.

I'm still testing the rome total war and I'm not yet cutoff-free in that game. Irritating.

I have found something really weird though, which may or may not have something to do with the cutoff. The thing is, I have 2 hard-drives.. 7200rpm samsung as primary and 5400rpm samsung as secondary. My OS and games are in the 7200rpm hard-drive but the virtual memory is in the secondary HD.. just to make everything as fast as possible. You'll understand if you know something about optimizing windows.

But, I found the strangest thing.. I can play quake and play asio winamp fine if the mp3 played resides in the primary (faster) HD or if it's an internet radio. But when I play a mp3 from the secondary HD.. well. Quake sounds cut out very quickly. That's very strange indeed.

I was just thinking.. as my virtual memory is in the secondary HD maybe accessing that during memory hogging gaming might cause cutoff somehow too. I haven't really tested that yet and I'm reluctant to test it since it doesn't make any sense, also I've tweaked the virtual memory real hard.. made the pagefile 1 fragment and made the fastest configuration (correct HD, correct volume etc).

Well, anyways.. there are some weird problems with emu cards and directsound.. this new find about the mp3 thing really makes it even stranger. First I thought it's just the stutter but maybe the stutter is just one way of triggering somekind of spike related to the secondary-HD that is making emu driver cutoff sound.

Don't know yet.. but I don't think that I have the resources and the will to actually find the real reason behind these strange cutoff's people are having and I'm having. There is something specific causing this but it's something that everyone doesn't experience. Only a portion of the users.. although a fairly large portion but anyways.

 

[GokieKS]

Haven't tried... my 0404 is in my main workstation that I almost never play games on (even though it'd make a pretty nice gaming machine... A64 3000+ @ 2.3, nF3 Ultra, 6600GT). My gaming is done on my secondary system, which has my old Audigy (which I originally bought because I needed a FireWire port...) installed.

~KS

 

[Erukian]

I used to have the sound cut out in half-life 2.

What i found out is that if i dont change the vcore from the cpu from the default when i overclock, then it's fine. Also i set the IRQ priority to second under the System clock.

-Joe

 

[saturnine]

Absolutely no problems with any game here. Played through Doom3, HL2, and play UT2K4 & Wolf: ET on a regular basis.

 

[ooheadsoo]

No game will play on my 1212m. All cut off within a minute. 1 gig of ram, 5 7200rpm hdds, blah blah. Good thing my onboard works.

 

[Asterix]

I had this problem with my favorite game and I also noticed quite a bit of fps (frames per second) lag when I ran benchmarks using the E-mu, even using lower quality sampling mode, compared to the Audigy 2. The trade-off to using the A2 instead of the E-mu as the DSP was some of the E-mu's rich tonal quality, which I found is especially warm and rich in the midrange compared to the overall A2 sound which sounds sucked out in the mids. The A2's sound is clear and acceptable for gaming, but it does not sound like the E-mu. It makes sense though that for games a different design is necessary for the audio processer in order to perform well in speed benchmarks, which is pretty important for gamers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ooheadsoo No game will play on my 1212m. All cut off within a minute. 1 gig of ram, 5 7200rpm hdds, blah blah. Good thing my onboard works.