PREY - Sound Problem Solved - SLI related, not SB related -

Question

Hi Folks,
I have posted this in a few places on the web to help out people with PREY now that it has hit the shelves so they don't have the same issues I did. My story:
I just spent $ 75 bucks I didn't need to. I have a MSI K8N Diamond Plus running a AMD 4800+ Dual Core, with 2 gigs of RAM in dual channel, and two EVGA E-Geforce 7900 GTX 52MB running SLI. The mobo comes stock with onboard sound, which is a Audigy SE w/ EAX-HD. Turns out the sound is based on a Li've 24-bit chip soldered onto the main board. It is a 6 bit card, meeting the minium requirements on the box.Bought Prey, loaded it, and the game looked perfect but vocals were totally distorted and there was horrible static. I did everything, tried reloading vid drivers, sound drivers, nforce drivers, the game three times and still no joy. I came on this site and played with the hardware acceleration etc etc etc that I have read so often in many posts. No joy.So my buddy convinced me I needed a Creative X-FI card. So I went out and bought a X-FI Extreme Music. I went into the CMOS and disabled onboard sound, uninstalled the old Creative drivers, even uninstalled my nforce and vid drivers. Put in the new card, rebooted, installed newest nforce 6.86, rebooted, installed newest vid card drivers, rebooted, installed newest drivers for X-FI with the Fatality OpenAL support, rebooted. Defragged. Re-installed the game. Went to play it expecting to reap the beautiful sound goodness I worked for, and the same frickin problem. All that work, new card, same vocal distortion and static. At this point I started looking over my shoulder expecting to see my wife standing there with her arms crossed giving me the hairy eyeball with one eyebrow up and tapping her foot. You know how that is....So I went online, scoured 6 dozen mainstream and obscure sites all the way to Russia and found ONE site where one guy on the 0th page on the 5th post on it was talking about the DEMO he tried of PREY and he mentioned in passing that he disabled SLI and ran the game in single card mode because SLI interfered somehow with the sound.So I thought to myself, no way. I right clicked my desktop, went to Settings, Advanced, clicked on Nvidia, went to the SLI tab and cleared the box for "Enable SLI".Rebooted. Game runs perfect. Now I gotta explain to my wife why I spent $ 75 bucks on a sound card I didn't really need.But all that doesn't matter now, cuz I spent 5 hours on it last night. Words cannot describe this game. I've played them all - and I just have to say I want to meet the designers and shake their hands. This is the most beautiful, imaginati've, NON-repetiti've, refreshing, eye-candy drop dead georgous FPS I ever saw. The musical score is genius. The imagination that went into the storyline, and artwork is astounding. Most importantly, the gameplay is none other than spectacular.Enjoy it fellow SLI'ers. I hope this post helps you.Grog

Answer 1

You're late to the party. I am currently running almost the exact same setup as you with the exception of my 7900GTXs in SLI being from XFX, but that part obviously doesn't matter and the sound board being an X-FI Elite Pro.
Anyway, the onboard Audigy SE works great in everything with SLI enabled, but I obviously want to use the X-FI and that's where I run into the problems with SLI enabled. However, SLI isn't the problem given how it works for many other sounds boards and on top of that, the SLI architecture was around before the X-FI, so Creative needed to test against this more stringently.
Regardless, it's been known for a while about disabling SLI, it's just not a good answer. Thanks for the input though.
I agree about Prey, very entertaining!Message Edited by zcaa0g on 07-8-2006 2:23 PM