XF-I & Call Of Duty-United offensive EAX odd noi

Question

When I set Call of Duty: United Offensi've to use EAX (,2 or 3) I'm getting sudden bursts of environmental sound. Maybe 2 or 3 every minute or so. e.g. sudden bursts of tank noise or footste
ps.
I'm running a Shuttle SN95G5, X-FI Extreme Music, XFX 6800GT, Gb corsair RAM, Athlon FX55. All running latest drivers.
Anyone any suggestions?
I contacted Creative Tech support but they suggested turning EAX off. This solvesthe problem but does leave me wondering exactly what I've paid for.

Answer 1

I think this is the PCI latency issue again. I see the same thing. It happened with the Audigy 2 ZS as well, and it still happens with the X-Fi (although less often). You can try moving the card to different slots and messing with the PCI latency of your graphics card which may be too high. Do a search on google. I haven't had luck with changing PCI latency, but I wonder if that is because I have a PCI express motherboard. I don't know if a PCI express graphics card is subject to PCI latency parameters like an AGP card is (it is an ENTIRELY different bus).
As to whose fault it is, I suppose both Creative and the developer could blame each other. The problem is that hardware DirectSound3D/EAX acceleration doesn't seem to fail gracefully in this case. When your graphics card is overloaded, you drop frames, which is reasonable. When the X-Fi is overloaded, you drop sound samples which can result in cracks and pops and other distortion.