Does gaming on a PC mean constant sound delay?

Hardware Hub Other Hardware
1

I've been gaming on a PC in the past, I've been moving to consoles back and forth and now after a long "console era" (for me), I've decided to get "back to the roots" (in a way) and play more on the PC.

Today I've got my new GTX 660 and it's awesome. I also got a Sound Blaster Z sound card because I can't possibly play in stereo-only having a full floorstanding surround system (and being used to surround sound on my PS3) so I've got this card in order to be able to enjoy surround sound via Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect.

Obviously, my AV receiver doesn't have a set of analogue "per channel" mini-jack inputs so, just as I did with the on-board sound, I also hooked up the Sound Blaster to the TOSLINK digital output and guess what - there's a delay! I can't believe it! I've just spent money on buing a graphics card, a soundcard and the additional RAM and a new HDD are already shipping and now I found out that in order to play games on a PC, I must have a delay in sound. WTF?!

So here are my questions - is this OK for all of you? Do you also play with a lag in sound and don't worry about it? Or maybe it's a problem with my card and I should return it and get a different one? Is this something that's "normal" when using DTS Connect or DD Live? Is there no place for games that have a good big sound system?

I did some research and I'm confused - some people say that there's always a lag when using DD Live or DTS Connect because... that's how it is, the encoding takes time. Some say they use these features and have absolutely no lag at all so please enlighten me - am I doomed to see the gun in my game shoot and then hear it fire a moment later? Or see how I die and then hear the bullet that killed me?

Hell, it's not even in games, every YouTube video, everything played through the GOM Player - everything has an audio delay. I can't... function like this. Of course switching DTS Connect off fixes this issue, but then I have only stereo sound as the optical connection doesn't have the bandwidth to carry uncompressed surround sound.

So again - how do you play? What about HDMI? The graphics card has an HDMI out, but... is it also used for audio? Of course HDMI can transfer even uncompressed surround audio, that's what it does on my PS3, but does the HTML out on a PC's graphics card carry audio too? Sorry for stupid question, but again - I've been on the console side for quite a while and as I was gaming on a PC in the past, I've had just some regular PC speakers hooked up through the mini-jacks and I've never even thought aboud audio lag.

2

There definitely no lag in my sound...

3

So you're hooking up your PC through an optical cable, use DD Live or DTS Connect and you have no lag? What sound card do you have?

 

4

hdmi on pc does indeed carry the sound. if you feel like being a mad scientist you can get creative with aduio solutions.  using adapters multi links and such. i have my pc sound playing through a dell monitor with speaker wire ports and no internal speakers and it is also linked to my reciever to make fake surround.

there are many soultions to getting rid of the dealy and having killer sound.  just depends on how creative you can be.

5

So again - how do you play?

I play on a 23" monitor connected using DVI, with sound coming directly from sound card to my speakers or headphones. No lag whatsoever.

6

Thank you very much, you gave me some hope :)

Well, I don't mind getting creative, I'll try some HDMI-based solutions, but what makes me wonder - if I would hook up the PC via HDMI to the A/V receiver so that basically I would get rid of DVI as then also the video would go through HDMI, then would the audio that comes through HDMI also be handled by the Sound Blaster and have the great quality teh SB can produce or would then the on-board audio chip kick in and take over?

8

i cannot say for shure if the sound blaster would kick in or if it would be using onboard audio. my asus crosshair v has killer onboard sound so i never bought a sound card. i am not an audiophile so i dont know all of the specifics of sound setups. i just know what works and sounds good to me.

10

@Armithaig

My A/V Receiver has of course a Direct and Pure Direct mode, but this makes no difference. Besides, I have absolutely no lag on the PS3 which is hooked up to it too, but then - it transfers audio and video via HDMI so I guess the receiver makes sure there's no lag and syncs them accordingly.

I just hooked up the PC via HDMI, the HDMI cable goes to the receiver and here are the results - NO LAG! :) However... the sound quality is well... it's definietely not the Sound Blaster handling it, I can tell that clearly. Sound is very important to me and the difference in sound quality between the SB and the onboard audio is beyond compare in favor of SB. The SB is just crystal clear, very "rich" sound, the on-board audio sounds much flatter . I'm sure SB does some enhancing on the way, but still - it doesn't sound like it's overly enhanced it's just much better (oh and, I've switched off all enhancements and the lag remains). However, I can have surround sound this way. The receiver picks it up as PCM so no encoding is going on and it's lag-free sound (also quality-free, though).

As for how much the latency is. I've just checked a video on YouTube playing two short sounds with different latencies and it seems to be somewhere around 80-100ms. I can imagine how some people may not even notice it, but to me it's just unacceptable to see someone talking and their lips not being in perfect sync with what comes out. Or even worse in music videos or concerts - the drummer hits the cymbals and I hear it a short while later.

Reg. your latest edit - I don't hear any difference (latency-wise) between DD Live and DTS Connect. The weird thing is - as I've started a game, the sound was also choppy in DD Live and it was perfect in DTS so I picked up DTS, but again - I've tested all possible settings I could find and the latency remains.

Is it software or hardware encoded? Well, according to Creative, it's hardware and that's the whole point of the Sound Blaster. I've also checked how much resources are used when playing some sound as I've got an i3 540 CPU ("old" Clarkdale) so who knows... but while watching a YouTube video (with audio lag) there's only a 10% CPU usage so I guess that's pretty much the decoding and display of the video itself so it doesn't look like the CPU does any encoding.

Reg. resorting to analog - that's not an option, my receiver doesn't have the mini-jack inputs so going analog would mean buying PC speakers and as you might have noticed by now, I'm not easily pleased with crappy sound and I have no intention in spending any money to buy something that will certainly be worse than my current speaker system. So the worst case scenario is, or rather are:

1. Using the onboard audio via HDMI just to have lag-free surround.

2. Accept the lag.

Option #2 is maybe even worse in watching video or dialogues than gaming itself. I'm gonna have to play some more this way to see if there's any option to get used to it, but when I'm not gaming, I can just switch off DTS Connect to watch YouTube in stereo as all the videos there are stereo anyway... I guess.

Bottom line - I'm extremely disappointed. I've done detailed research for the past couple of weeks before deciding to upgrade the PC to make it game-compatible and just starting good old Battlefield 2 today with the GTX 660 was amazing especially going 1080p, setting everything to max and... it's still super-smooth, no noticeable framerate issues... and then there's a latency in sound. :( It's something I just didn't even consider as possible. I knew that any encoding takes resources, but I even did research on that and found all the specifications of all the different sound card models and all advertise with "DD Live and DTS Connect encoding for awesome gaming experience with surround sound" and they NEVER even put a small star there with a tiny imprint that "it may result in lag" so I didn't even dig deeper into it. Heck, I even Googled how to get surround via TOSLINK and everyone said, you just need a card that does digital encoding on-the-fly and you're good to go. No mention of any lag :(

12

640kbps? 106kbps per channel? It can't be, I can't stand hearing a 128kbps MP3 file so either the DD compression is so good that the decoded sound is great or... no idea, at least I can't hear out any compression artifacts, but then - I'm also satisfied with songs from iTunes which are merely 256kbps, but... encoded with AAC and that's clearly superior to MP3 so if DD > AAC...?

Anyway, reg. the receiver - I have a Pioneer VSX-1122-K which, as pretty much everything I buy, was a very throught-through purchase after actually months of research as this + my Wharfedale Diamond 10.6 (2x) + 10.2 (2x) speaker set wasn't exactly that cheap although it's certainly not what you would consider "high-end". Nonetheless, that's not something people normally hook up to their PCs and again - I didn't even think of the PC because I was primarily gaming on my PS3, which also served (still does) as my Blu-ray player so ... all was fine and I'm, not sure if there was even one receiver that had analogue jack inputs during my research, but then - I didn't think about this, I mean - we're all digital now, who wants such old analogue imputs?

As for Creative - my old (and first) PC had a SB Live Platinum with this nice front panel that allowed me to easily hook up my bass directly as it had a 1/4 inch jack input and this thing could even distort the input live without any delay, but then as I've built my new (current) PC, I found out that they don't even have drivers for Windows 8, 7... hell, they apparently cut off driver support as Vista came out. That almost completely drove me away from Creative, but... not knowing exactly that I'll need digital encoding, I relied just on the on-board sound... until now when I've decided to move on to PC gaming "for real" so I've got the Sound Blaster Z and here I am :(

You know what's the worst part - it's not even about the money and getting a refund. Sure, I could get that (where I live, you can return everything you buy online within 10 days without having to say why, that's the law and they must return me the money), but the worst part is the knowledge that the gaming experience I was expecting will pretty much never be possible unless I would downgrade everything, buy PC speakers with analog inputs etc. Honestly, I would prefer to find out that I have some faulty unit rather than know that this is how it works and if you want to play games on a PC through a "big" sound system, you're screwed and stuck with audio lag... or bad audio.

Oh and, one more thing? You know what was the main reason why I've decided to get a sound card at all? Because ASUS screwed up the on-board audio! ;) I've got a P7H55 MoBo from ASUS and it has a VIA 1708S chip which, according to VIA, is capable of DD Live (and/or DTS connect?), but... "some motherboard manufacturers may not support it". What the hell? Now, this makes me wonder, if the on-board audio would actually support DD Live and I would use HDMI which, as I just found out, doesn't have audio lag, would this then also lag via HDMI? Wouldn't the receiver sunc the audio and video to prevent such lag or would it still be present?

13

I'm not sure about this because I never worked with something more complex than connecting a pair of headphones to analog outpit.

Have you tried using digital output from oboard audio?

Have you tried connecting audio input for HDMI on GTX 660 to your Sound Blaster?

15

I'm using a couple of bookshelf speakers, a subwoofer, and a receiver. The receiver is hooked into the sound card and both speakers are routed through the subwoofer and then into the receiver. I don't have any delay at all.

16

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/How-to-Use-The-SPDIF-Connector-Available-on-GeForce-Video-Cards/600/1

I found this. Does this look useful?

17

can u use optical? then run sp/dif (wahtever the fuck it is), from ytour computer, to the head unit

18

Thanks for your feedback so far, let's start with REPLIES:

@Dissentient

Yes, I can, in fact I use an optical cable, but that's the problem - an optical connection only has enough bandwidth to push a "raw" stereo signal, everything multi-channel must be encoded to DD or DTS and doing so introduced the lag I'm referring to.

 

@Vortex88

Interesting. Do you have 4 or more speakers? If so - how do you connect the PC to the receiver? Optical? In stereo, I don't have any delay either, it's the surround where it gets problematic due to the on-the-fly encoding.

 

@Dissentient

I'm afraid it won't help. I don't think (I've checked) that the Sound Blaster has an internal S/PDIF connector and therefore, I can as well just use the direct HDMI connection which won't include SB's "enhancements".

 

@Armithaig

Good point, with HDMI being a standard nowadays, optical connections or "alternative solutions" are redundant since HDMI handles hi-def video and uncompressed multichannel audio without an issue so maybe my lack of knowledge caused me to even think about a soundcard. I admit that I found it "weird" to see that whenever I updated the drivers for my graphics card, one of the components in installed was "HDMI Audio Driver" as I didn't exactly associate the name "nVidia" with "audio" in the past ;)

Reg. analog connections on my receiver - are we talking about the same thing? Of course it has a nice set of analog connectors, but... coaxial and I would need mini-jacks. Heck, even if I had coaxial outputs, the inputs on my receiver work only as different sources and not different channels so I can have source A as an analog stereo signal and source B as another analog stereo signal, but it won't work as source A for front channels, source B for rear channels.

Reg. HDMI - it is not from my board because... my board doesn't have any ;) so yeah, it's from the graphics card so as mentioned above, I will get an update in the "nVidia HD Audio" driver.

Reg. the return of the card - now, on one hand you're absolutely right, HDMI is the perfect all-in-one solution (no Xbox pun intended ;) ) so it seems that sound cards are unnecessary and I actually am considering recording music professionally or "semi-professionally" (whatever that means) and I know that for this I'm going to look at completely different solutions, either cards created specifically for that or some otehr stand-alone mixers, but for now, here are the advantages of keeping the Sound Blaster:

- According to Creative, with an 1/4 to 1/8 jack "thingy", I can hookup a guitar to the Line-In

- ...or a microphone

- It has a signal-to-noise ratio of 116dB while the on-board chip has 90dB for ADC (and 100dB for DAC)

- Just in case I would want to get headphones for some reason - it would probably work great with them

- AFAIK (but I'm not sure about this), the SB has ASIO support while the on-board sound not really which apparently may be a pain when using a tool such as the FXpansion BFD2 (virtual drum kit)...?

Note - I am certainly not producing music just yet and I'm aware that for that there are different tools I'm gonna have to get, but just to have these options, I think I won't really mind losing these $100 for not having to stick to the on-board solution.

 

Now some NEW STUFF:

It looks like I'll end up with the HDMI solution after all as I would prefer to get the "unenhanced" audio, but lag-free rather than the enhanced version but with lag or just stereo.

But here's one thing that bugs me because I don't fully understand it so I hope you guys can enlighten me. Let's take the previously mentioned Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as an exmple - I have this game both for the PS3 and the PC (was cheap on Steam and I wanted a comparison) and on the PS3 disc and the box, it has the Dolby Digital logo. The PC version also starts by showing the EA (bleh), Frostbite, DICE and... Dolby Digital logo. In other words, this game is "in Dolby Digital" (whatever that means).

Now, there are other games that claim to be "in DTS" or other formats, but what does this really mean technically? Does a PC game that's "in DD" produce a DD sound and then the PC decodes it and then, when I use the DD Live, it re-encodes it once again? If so, why can't I set it up to pass-through the originally encoded sounds from the game using the optical connection. When I have a video file that happens to have DTS encoded sound, then even with the on-board sound, my GOM Player can push the original DTS sound to the receiver and there's absolutely no lag because there is no encoding on the way.

So again - how is it with games? I've tried all the available audio options in Battlefield which basically comes down to choosing between headphones, Hi-fi, Home cinema etc. but this makes no change to the way the sound is being transferred (just changes the dynamics). Can I "force" a game to pass the digital sound directly out without any processing ? If so - how? If not, then why do games advertise as being "in DD" or "in DTS" if they can't push this signal encoded?

20

M-Audio? That's exactly what I've had under my radar already :) I'm not there yet, but I'll keep that in mind. You're pretty much reading my mind and writing it down, I agree on the PCIe vs USB debate - also tending towards PCIe, but on the other hand, if I would use an external "recording box" (via USB) and it would allow me to hear what I play via headphones (and I expect anything that would be sold as "pro gear" is certainly going to have this) then there would really be no latency. At least no perceived latency for me. The data coming into the PC might be delayed, but I would hear it even before it does and even if other tracks should be fed into the headphones then I would expect the sound to be buffered accordingly to make up for the latency. Again - I will do some detailed reasearch on that when I reach the point where I start consider recording stuff professionally :) At this point, the current setup allows me to just record stuff and the upgrade to pro tools will onyl be necessary if I start considering publishing, for now it's just more like "taking notes" (but still appreciating if they sound good).

Thanks for the explanation... Googling WASAPI... oh, OK so there really is something between "what the game does" and what "leaves the sound system" (I mean sound card or on-board sound). That's the source of the issue I was talking about - when the sound reaches the output, it's no longer encoded as it should be in it's "raw" form.

Now, to clarify as judging by the last part, you might have misunderstood me - I have no problems with HDMI. At this point I'm now happily gaming with ridiculous framerates (as in - very high) and with surround sound... via HDMI. The receiver always shows me what kind of signal it gets fed and the GTX 660 feeds it PCM all the time. If a YouTube clik is in stereo, I'll hear just stereo, in-game I hear surround sound so at least I have now the peace of mind that I CAN game with great sound.

Now, the thing that bugged me (or I found interesting) was something I've noticed only with the optical connection. During gaming, watching YouTube etc. the receiver only got a stereo signal so this WASAPI thing seemed to always prefer to push the sound uncompressed. Some MKV files with a DTS track behaved differently. The moment I've played them, I saw "DTS" on the receiver and all surround indicators lit up and I've got surround sound. So again - with HDMI, no problem, I get PCM directly, don't even care if whatever comes in was originally DTS or DD - it works, but I'm wondering why isn't there at least an option to choose in-game to just pass the original DTS/DD signal to an optical S/PDIF connector without encoding it because if this was possible, I would have got DD or DTS even before the recent upgrade using just on-board sound as I know it's technically capable of feeding me this signal (from an MKV, for example).

21

I just have a 2.1 setup, so it's all stereo. I'm just using RCA cables right now, because my receiver doesn't use optical. I'm probably going to replace my receiver soon though, so I can run optical to it and also so I can route a PS4 through it to work bettter with my monitor.

One thing about optical cables is that the sound quality starts to seriously degrade after about 16 feet, so the length of the cable might be a problem for you.

22

:P VarHyid  i hope that it is the windows remixing that is giving you the lag and you should be able to change that setting so that it does not remix it.

by the way this has reminded me that i need to figure out my brothers 5.1 surround system.

23

@Vortex88 - thanks for the info. Yes, I though about the length, but my cable has only about 6 feet and it's the minimum to get from the PC to the receiver otherwise I would literally have to put them next to each other, I doubt that losing 2-3 feet would solve it, but anyway, thanks for the info :)

@Armithaig - FWIW, you've said earlier that the sound qality via HDMI should be as good as it gets since it's all digital anyway and you're right, but why was I getting worse sound than from the SB? Well, I noticed that it was primarily lacking some bass and it turns out it was a simple settings issue. The devide (HDMI Audio) was set up to handle a full 5.1 system, that is incl. a sub-woofer. Telling it that I don't have one (and I really don't) and that all my speakers can handle the full range solved even this problem :)

24

I've tried everything before finally switching to HDMI-only and nothing seemed to help - the moment I switched the encoding on, the lag appeared. I turn it off - it's gone so there's not much I could have done about it, as it turns out. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find some use for the Sound Blaster ;) At least it shines red which is probably its best feature ;D

26

Thanks for the info, I'll see what can be done, maybe even get the card to pass through the encoded signal, but so far it looks like it already should have done that, I even have the DTS and DD boxes checked in the device settings where it asks which formats my receiver can handle so it can be sent to it directly and yet it doesn't do it.

Maybe the game is at fault, I mean - if the GOM player can do it and can pass through the DTS track without changing it, then a game should/could have such option, too, but at least Battlefield: BF2 doesn't. They've tried to simplify the sound settings "for dummies" (which is ironic as it's the PC version of the game so I don't think the user would be overwhelmed if there was a clear "pass-through" or 5.1, 7.1 etc. option) and just name it "Home cinema", "headphones" etc. but it doesn't really affect the encoding. Also tried Red Orchestra 2, but there there aren't even any advanced sound options other than volume control, headset-related stuff etc.

It's a shame that game devs pay less attention to sound. I know that graphics are "the main thing", but when I see how many options for graphics I have and then go to the sound menu and there's just like... 1 checkbox and 2 volume controls then it's just breaks my... eardrum ;)

Anyway, so far the main problem is solved for me with HDMI and today I've got the second part of my upgrade shipment, that is - additional 4 GB of RAM and a 1 TB HDD so... the PC gaming era can begin for me (again) :)