While running the game in full resolution (1920x1200), I noticed a memory leak occuring on my machine after about 15 minutes of play, sound got very choppy.

This may suggest lowering your visual performance down to a lower resolution, but I am just stabbing at the moment. Waiting on a official call back from 2K Games on my findings so far.

Just looked at my post before the last one, do I make any sense? I am currently working on about 12 total hours of sleep since Monday, so I am a bit out of it today hehe.

Hello Smaug. Very many thanks with being so prompt to reply to me

In answer to your queries, my audio codec is set to 24 bit 44100Hz (Studio quality) as I find this setting to also be the best one for using Media Player 11 as it stops my music from stuttering when changing from one track to the next in a playlist. I did try other levels together with Bioshock but nothing was different.
I have also emailed my DXDiag report to you as requested.
I have a feeling you may be correct about Vista's lack of DirectSound support being the problem as I remember there was an issue with a game called Alpha Prime not so long ago, where it refused to play back any sound other than ambient noise when playing under Vista. Searching on the 'net for a solution I did find something about turning off EAX then setting ingame sound quality to low then re-enabling EAX. This did work to a certain extent though some sounds would be slightly distorted or hollow. Of course, Bioshock (at least the demo) has no option to change sound quality other than reverb which makes no difference to me.

Anyway, I haven't noticed any memory leak but then I haven't really been able to play long enough! I have tried various resolutions though - my X1800XT is a fairly recent purchase and I wanted to see what it could do Looked very nice indeed and I didn't notice any significant loss of framerate.

And, yes, your post made perfect sense to me but then I do tend to ramble on myself when tired

In my netseraches I came across the following text from GameSpot member rams18:

You need to removethe existing graphic drivers before installing the latest beta version. I did this and it solved my "no sound" issue that I was getting when I first downloaded the demo. My spec E6600, 2GB RAM & a BFG GTX 8800. It allruns fine now with everything set to max getting 50-60fps

Since we know you have the beta drivers, did you remove your previous graphics drivers and rever to a default adapter before moving to the beta drivers? This could be bogus info, but it aint a bad suggestion. It could help explain why DirectX is involved and perhaps goes partly to my memory leak in the 3rd level.

Blue,

I have done a lot of work with Direct Sound last night, but I am unable to recreate your problem on Vista 32bit. When DirectX 8 and 8.1 were released, a setting wihin dxdiag corrected a lot of problems similar to this one, this is what I eluded to an my earlier posting. I actually found was of the original threads on another site, I think I deleted the fix here, or it got lost in one of our upgrades.

www.rage3d.com/board/a...23506.html

Let me know if that is even applicable on your OS.

Download the DirectX applet from here and extract the directx.cpl file to your windows\system directory.

You'll now see a "DirectX" applet in Control Panel...Click on "DirectX" to open the DirectX Properties window and select the "DirectSound" tab. Under "Debug Output Level", move the slider all the way to the left (less) and click "Apply".

This is taken from the readme that used to be included with the applet...

Microsoft left debug mode on in DirectX for Direct sound I suspect, and this would not be the first time. That is eating up cpu cycles from having that on, not to mention software/hardware conflicts that it can create. Back in 2001 they did the same thing in DirectX 8.0 and 8.1, and I think we embarrassed them pretty good, but it seems not good enough to make sure it didn;t happen again.

This is still pure speculation, more testing is needed to come up with a positive solution.

I have left several messages for 2K Games before I do an article and my game review about the sound issues. Sadly, the game was released during the huge German game show, and PAX taking place, so most of the PR folks are out of the office until next week.

Hi 'Smaug, I've been reading your comments on this and other forums and have tried all the suggested fixes to no avail (including the setting of the debug in Direct Sound way down)... I'm running Vista 64 and I noticed quite a few of the people posting about the problem have 64 bit processors, just wondering if that might have something to do with it... *shrug*

Registered to tell you that the fix for the Vista -> XP SP2 Compatibility worked fine. I love you.

mrated and Josh,

Welcome to both of you, and thanks for taking the time to register at our humble little site.

I am aware that 64bit Vista is not being resolved by the various fixes I have attempted so far. I wish I had a copy of it myself darnit. I am going to head into my office at work and see if I can drum up a copy to test with.

FYI for anyone running Windows XP

Adjusting audio codecs in Windows XP (These instructions may differ slightly from sound card to soundcard, but should ge you closer)

-Control Panel
- Sounds and Audio Devices
- Go to the "Audio" tab
- Look for "Sound Playback" area near the top of the window and click "Advanced" under the default device
- Adjust "Hardware acceleration" and "Sample conversion rate quality" sliders down a notch and try the game
- Repeat and rinse till you find the best situation for your machine