8 replies to this topic

[Makovorn]

Having had the opportunity to participate in the first beta world event for GW2, I have a question about a nagging audio issue that I and (according to the official forums) some other players had as well:

It has to do with audio glitches and break-ups on the sound effects of the game. The music and ambient audio seems largely unaffected, but combat sounds and vocalizations seems to have bad break-up or audio taring on some systems.

I've uploaded a small audio example here:

The above example is an extreme case - it's not always as bad as this - I isolated about a minute of an hour's worth of audio recording for this example.

The sound card I use, is the on-board Realtek (it's got a Sound Blaster X-Fi software layer) chip on my Asus Maximus Gene IV. Are there players here who've had the same problem? If so, does anyone know if there's a way to remedy this? Any help or feedback will be most appreciated. Thank you.

[FrogKnight87]

Beta. It will get fixed up.

[Makovorn]

FrogKnight87, on 30 April 2012 - 06:02 PM, said:

Beta. It will get fixed up.

On this note, I'd like to add that the problem only occurs on certain systems. For example, a friend of mine didn't have this at all (also using on-board Realtek audio) and I've also noticed that some fan created YouTube play-through's have these audio glitches, while some don't.

I would like to know if there are players who had these issues that managed to get them fixed - at this stage, we don't even know if it's a beta issue or not, since there isn't much data to go on and in posting this question here, I'm hoping to get a better handle on where the problem originates from.

Any helpful answers (other than "beta is beta") will be appreciated. If I can find the culprit for this issue, it will ultimately help me to give better feedback to ArenaNet about this. Or, perhaps it's only a small oversight (some sound setting maybe) on my part. Thanks.

[FrogKnight87]

I have on-board Realtek audio too. Interesting, I didn't notice such problems.

[Ramei Arashi]

The only audio problems I had was 1) Logan is hard to hear when he's talking while the earth elementalist boss is forming, 2) wrong gender voices, 3) audio and text not matching.

[Grit]

I didn't have any problems with the audio, personally.

There may be something you can do to fix the problem.. such as changing your sample rate/bit depth. Obviously we can't test anything until the next beta, though.

Saying that this is something that will be fixed before the game is released is a little shortsighted. There are bound to be lingering technical issues with the game, even months from now. That's always true of any PC game because there are so many variations in hardware and software levels. But it will be much easier for the players to come up with a solution when they aren't limited by 3 day beta events.

Edited by Grit, 30 April 2012 - 06:57 PM.

[LanceHardwood]

Ramei Arashi, on 30 April 2012 - 06:49 PM, said:

The only audio problems I had was 1) Logan is hard to hear when he's talking while the earth elementalist boss is forming, 2) wrong gender voices, 3) audio and text not matching.

I only noticed 2) when a female scout spoke to me in a very deep male voice.

[Mesmero-X]

Play the Charr area we talk like Humans... sometimes.

[Makovorn]

EDIT: For the sake of closure, I just want to add that the audio problems I (and others) have had, seems to be tied to the bug/anomaly of the GW2 client being run on low priority mode by default. Just in case someone else have the same problem described above and happens to stumble upon this post, here is what I did:

I ran the game in full screen windowed mode and had the task manager open. After starting the game, I tabbed over to the task manager and forced the client process to high priority mode. This seems to have solved the worst of the audio glitches.

With the beta being mostly CPU driven, it seems that a performance drop in the game affects the audio quite severely at places. For the record, I ran the game on a Intel 2700K based PC, 16Gb Ram, NVidia 580GT and the client on a raid 0 array.

Hope this helps anyone experiencing similar problems.


--- Original Post ---

Okay, just to reiterate, my question revolves around audio glitches and sound break-ups. Obviously, there's quite a lot of audio bugs in general, like gender issues, dialogue being missing, dialogue and text not matching, cut-scene's not being lip-synced etc. These are all known issues.

Kindly, have a listen to this:

It explains what I mean best.

Edited by Makovorn, 18 May 2012 - 04:35 PM.