Sound synchronization issue; what causes it, and can it be fixed? | Forums

[XyZspineZyX]

I won't bother posting my mile long DXDiag printout in this post for two reasons; #1)I'm not on my home computer, and #2) I believe this to be a game-specific issue, not a system configuration issue.

The speech is not in sync with the video, but *only* during cutscenes. It(the speech) doesn't get progressively more and more behind(as would be the case if the game was running too fast; IE, the game is running at 90fps, the sound is sync'd for 30, and so the video gets more and more ahead of the sound) instead, it seems to start too late. It *appears* to me that the game, for cutscenes, uses one long audio clip for the speech, and just plays that starting and ending at fixed points in time, and the game animations go about their business as well. The reason I say this is because even in scenes where there would be no stress on the system(such as *minor spoiler* the scene where you're given a mission update on agent double-H, and just shown snapshots that he took etc), the sound still lags behind the video. I've tried running the game at the absolute minimum settings, quite high settings, and everything in-between to no avail.

System specs:
AMD Athlon 2500+(barton core)
2x256MB ram(dual channel)
ATI Radeon 9600 pro
SBLive soundcard

I will say that all of my drivers(sound, forceware[my motherboard is an nforce board], and video) are all up to date, and I recently reformatted/reinstalled windows XP(recently as in, less than 2 weeks ago). The only thing I have yet to try is enabling vsync, I haven't seen an option to do this in the game settings menu, so I'll probably end up forcing it at the driver level. I'll probably get a chance to post the results of that before I get any replies to this, that being the case, I'll probably have an update on this later on this evening. If it's absolutely necessary, I can and will post my dxdiag later on when I'm at home, but because the sound is lagging behind the video, and not vice-versa, that suggests that either the video is running faster than the sound was sync'd for, OR, that the sound is starting too late in the scene, or possibly both.

Matt

[XyZspineZyX]

I won't bother posting my mile long DXDiag printout in this post for two reasons; #1)I'm not on my home computer, and #2) I believe this to be a game-specific issue, not a system configuration issue.

The speech is not in sync with the video, but *only* during cutscenes. It(the speech) doesn't get progressively more and more behind(as would be the case if the game was running too fast; IE, the game is running at 90fps, the sound is sync'd for 30, and so the video gets more and more ahead of the sound) instead, it seems to start too late. It *appears* to me that the game, for cutscenes, uses one long audio clip for the speech, and just plays that starting and ending at fixed points in time, and the game animations go about their business as well. The reason I say this is because even in scenes where there would be no stress on the system(such as *minor spoiler* the scene where you're given a mission update on agent double-H, and just shown snapshots that he took etc), the sound still lags behind the video. I've tried running the game at the absolute minimum settings, quite high settings, and everything in-between to no avail.

System specs:
AMD Athlon 2500+(barton core)
2x256MB ram(dual channel)
ATI Radeon 9600 pro
SBLive soundcard

I will say that all of my drivers(sound, forceware[my motherboard is an nforce board], and video) are all up to date, and I recently reformatted/reinstalled windows XP(recently as in, less than 2 weeks ago). The only thing I have yet to try is enabling vsync, I haven't seen an option to do this in the game settings menu, so I'll probably end up forcing it at the driver level. I'll probably get a chance to post the results of that before I get any replies to this, that being the case, I'll probably have an update on this later on this evening. If it's absolutely necessary, I can and will post my dxdiag later on when I'm at home, but because the sound is lagging behind the video, and not vice-versa, that suggests that either the video is running faster than the sound was sync'd for, OR, that the sound is starting too late in the scene, or possibly both.

Matt

[XyZspineZyX]

Hehe, I was going to recommend to force Vsync, but I see you've already decided to do that. On my 9800Pro, I leave it forced for all games. I can't stand screen tearing, so I have to run it.

My system:

AMD XP 3000+ @ 2.23Ghz
1 gig of Corsair DDR PC2700 RAM @354Mhz
Radeon 9800 Pro video w/TV out core @434, mem @730
Windows XP SP 1
Microsoft Directx 9.0b
Antec TruePower TrueBlue True480 PSU
LiteOn DVD+/-RW drive
Plexwriter CD-RW
Maxtor Diamond 9 160GB SATA hdd
Westerndigital 40 gig harddrive
Westerndigital 100 gig hdd (external)
Asus A7V600 VIA KT600 mainboard
Creative 5.1 surround system
Thermaltake Aquarius II liquid cooling system

Additional PC version help:

http://www.pcgamessource.com

<font color=ff0000>XIII Mod and Beyond Good and Evil Tech support mod

[XyZspineZyX]

Update:

Well, enabling vsync at the driver level(forcing it to "always on") seems to have worked. Maybe that should be made a sticky at the top of this forum? Just something along the lines of "If the in-game speech seems to lag behind the video, force vsync on in your video drivers" or something, I've seen more than a couple posts about the speech not being in sync with the video. Anyway, I'm happy now :P

[XyZspineZyX]

My graphics card, a GF4 Ti4200 128MB, had a Hardware Vertex Shader Unit that kept tearing the image into unrecognizable pieces until I read around and enabled VSYNC. BG&E has since ran really well, and without hitches.

[XyZspineZyX]

I have the same problem.. but I have to ask.. How do I enable Vsync as you have done.. Havent found that option anywhere..

[XyZspineZyX]

Use Rivatuner.

www.guru3d.com

[XyZspineZyX]

I have RinaTuner but I cant find where that option is .. :|

[XyZspineZyX]

DirectX section.
VSYNC tab.

[XyZspineZyX]

You can, most likely, also enable it in the driver settings. Right click on your desktop, and go to properties. Then go to the settings tab, then advanced. From there, it becomes a bit varied. Click through the tabs until you find OpenGL and DirectX settings. On those tabs, you should be able to enable vsync. There should be a few options. #1) always off, #2) off by default, #3) on by default, and #4) always on. You'll want to select always on, to enable vsync.