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Old 11-10-2013, 01:04 AM   #35
Ollie
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Quote:
Originally Posted by brainwreck View Post
A lot of people end up finding video drivers being the cause of bad audio performance. I would love to understand more about how this works. If anyone here can shed some light on it, that would be great.
Pulling some light out of my nose:

One of the problems is that fast (realtime) GFX and (realtime) audio processing may be competing for resources differently than your average game's audio and video anyway, meaning there may be problems never coming up if you don't run realtime audio. Different GFX driver version can have an effect on that for a couple of reasons.

Even if you're only playing games on that PC - that newer drivers can have detrimental effects on the performance of older card models and games is old news for long-time gaming video card buyers. For many older games and card versions, there's one or a few "golden" driver versions to run with it and you shouldn't change that.

One problem is that a driver package covers nn hardware versions of the card series, and features/optimizations for a newer/faster card model (making that new driver version necessary in first place) can be bad (or in best case not beneficial at all) for your particular older model.

The new card may introduce functionality not (hardware-) supported by your old card, so the driver tries to maintain compatibility to your model by emulating it in software, every once in a while a new driver is entirely optimized to win benchmarks and so on...

So there's a not so small chance that updating your drivers is messing up things for you, even if you don't run realtime audio applications, but if you do the likelihood may be even higher.
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