Sound Cards and Music/Game settings

Hey all,

Recently bought Assassin's Creed (awesome game) from Steam, and ran into some issues.

The game itself is awesome, Ubisoft is not. I can no longer hear voices in cutscenes, and have searched the internet and found no fix.

Anyways, this whole ordeal has made me think about getting a separate sound card from my RealTek built-in audio.
Mostly because of Realteks terrible support, but also because I have heard that I should get better sound quality from it.

The issue is that I have no idea what to look for in a sound card, don't know any good brands (except that I don't like Creative), and don't want to spend much (broke college student )

Any thoughts?

~Lordbob

This is a complete stab in the dark, from a non-expert.... but maybe worth a try, as it wouldn't cost anything to try, I don't think. My computer has the Realtek hardware that you see in my system specs, but my uncle , who built the machine, never put the Realtek drivers on it.....he said it is running the built-in Windows sound driver.

Maybe it's worth trying that with the game before you buy a sound card?

As you may know, the actual sound quality you'll gain from a dedicated sound card will be largely dependant on the speakers themselves.


I really only have experience with the Creative Xtreme Gamer, and have very good luck with mine..
No issues to speak of, although I know theres many horror stories. Just never encountered them myself, and even use all official software/drivers.



But Im guessing this isn't an option for you :)


It may also be worth looking into the ASUS Xonar line.



Hopefully others may be able to give you something more productive.

Perhaps. But the sound doesn't work quite right without the drivers.

Personally, I think the game is poorly coded at best...

~Lordbob

This is a wild guess, but have you checked the game settings to see if they match your speaker configuration? Many recent games rely heavily on positional audio* and come with 5.1 set as default. If you have just two speakers that might explain your glitch. I'm running an old-school quadraphonic setup and run into this all the time. My onboard Realtek lets me set it for quad, but has all sorts of issues. (Like wanting to use only the front pair all the time.)

*So you can hear the bad guys sneaking up on you from the left-rear, etc.

Yeah. I have messed with every possible setting (no, really).

I just ordered this: Newegg.com - ASUS Xonar DS 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz PCI Interface Audio Card

~Lordbob

Nice. Let us know how it works out :)

Wishmaster said:

Nice. Let us know how it works out :)

Will do.

Looks nice. Hope it improves both speakers and headphone quality

~Lordbob

stormy13 said:

Lordbob75 said:

Looks nice. Hope it improves both speakers and headphone quality

As long as you have semi decent speakers and headphones to begin with, yes it will. May even find yourself joining the ranks of us that say to those that think onboard is "good enough" that,

1. They have never heard any better.

2. Their speakers are broken.

3. Their ears are broken.

Hopefully!

~Lordbob