USB audio makes games load slow?

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Compddd

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 6, 2003
Messages
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I switched from a receiver/HDMI setup to a USB AMP/DAC setup and now all my games take forever to load for the initial loading screen.

Anyone heard of something like this happening before with USB DAC?
 
Check to see if there is a Turbo USB 3.0 option (or similar) in your BIOS.
This may take up PCI-E lanes from your GPU.

My last motherboard was a P67a that had this option and it changed the gfx cards PCI-E bus from x16 to x8 when enabled.
 
I used to use EMU 0404 USB 2.0 and never noticed that. I think USB audio does use a bit more cpu resources though. Maybe it is a crap audio driver issue and not the hardware.
 
I just tested it by disabling the USB DAC and enabling it, it's night and day difference on game start up times.

You think the Microsoft audio driver is to blame?
 
USB audio shouldnt use hardly any resources considering the bitrates.
It is just a conduit for data transfer, nothing more.
My CPU rises just above idle by a few % when playing audio. Similar to when I copy a file over USB.

I have 2 external USB DACs and have never had a performance issue while using them.
Except for when I enabled USB turbo which knocked the PCI-E speed down to x8.

You may have a point about a bad driver.
The op has been here over 12 years, I would hope by now he knows to monitor CPU use.
But just in case, op, have you checked CPU use when playing audio?

A response to my earlier post would be helpful as well.
 
I checked my mobo for the USB turbo option, couldn't find anything :/ It's an Asus Z97

I tried a new test, I left the USB DAC plugged in, but set the onboard audio as the default, the games boot instantly.

Must be the driver?

I'll check the CPU usage next.
 
Have you updated your drivers for the motherboard ever?
 
CPU useage 1-3 % when playing audio, 1-5% when loading up the game.

Should I try reformatting? I'm on Windows 10 Pro
 
I believe I am on the latest drivers for my mobo, would that really cause such a weird issue though?
 
Ah, Win10. ;)

My Emu came with its own driver and didn't use Windows driver but I had a Logitech USB headset and it used Windows driver and had no issue on Win7/8.
 
Nenu said:
USB audio shouldnt use hardly any resources considering the bitrates.
Click to expand...

Actually USB audio is notorious in gaming circles. It can become a bottleneck due to its serial nature. Even though it doesn't use much resources per se, it hogs cpu by having the cpu wait for it.

I'm not exactly up to date with the mechanism but I have read that in some cases even your gameplay can slow down due to the game engine being stalled by the serial bus.

It seems that the OP hit such a case.
 
DPC latency (Deferred Procedure Call) is likely the culprit here if the problem doesn't exist with the motherboard's onboard audio, or your video card HDMI out. If the drivers for your DAC were running in an exclusive kernel mode, I'd imagine you'd have pops, clicks, or interface drop-outs, but since they're likely using WDM filter mode -- you end up with a waitstate from a resource poll to end, as B00nie has stated.

Not much you can do about it, aside from just live with two interfaces. Use your HDMI or whatever out as the default, and then use your outboard DAC for critical listening. There are all sorts of DPC spike checking applications, that you can diagnose the problem with. Maybe you'll get lucky and can contact the device manufacturer for a hotfix. I've personally just accepted that I need to use onboard audio for watching media, browsing the web and playing games over the years for these very problems that always seem to turn up under certain configurations.

Edit: You could also try disabling HPET in the BIOS, to see if that solves your problems.
 
I couldn't find HPET in my BIOS, and I read Windows 10 doesn't use HPET anymore.

Tried uninstalling and reinstalling the USB DAC, tried removing all my USB devices except my mouse and the DAC. Nothing worked.

Guess I'm SOL and should get a receiver with HDMI and sell the DAC?
 
Try Windows 7 or 8.1 and see if they fare any better.
 
My USB Amp/Dac is The Element, made by JDS Labs. I emailed them and they were able to re-produce the slow game start up on their Windows 10 machines. They think it is a Windows 10 software/driver bug.
 
I already used that latency checker, it stayed green the whole time while testing and playing audio and loading/playing games.

I feel better since the manufacturer was able to re-produce the problem. They are going to try with other DACs besides The Element on Windows 10 and see what they find.

Not sure what could be done to fix it though, would need to be a driver update from Microsoft no?
 
Well okay, again I feel caught off guard with post P67 tech.

However. I've beel always under the impression that USB and SATA share common paths. Like back in the southbridge days.

Can you run your machine from a Live CD Linux distribution? In console mode? The Linux Kernel usually dumps things like USB disconnects and connections to the console (dmesg).
I had a mouse that worked just fine in Windows but was unusable in Linux because every few seconds it dropped from the bus and immediately reinitialized normal work for another few seconds.
I soldered a new usb wire to the mouse PCB and the problems stopped.

The OS loaded quicker.

Perhaps try different USB cables - all over. DAC, Mouse, Keyboard, Webcam, USB.
Does it happen with all games?
After seeing some weird stuff with a supermicro board, I would go overboard with caution and apply a shotgun approach to the problem.

Get some new (shorter and thicker) USB wires, disconnect unneeded drives, disable USB3, save your OC settings (or preferably not) and remove the CMOS battery for a minute.
Re-configure the CMOS like you want with no OC (to remove the BCLK quirks from the equation).
Get a PCIe USB 2.0 controller for cheap just for testing purposes.

Maybe your non-usb soundcard is still present on games' config files and their lack causes the drivers and the game to behave erratically - constantly talking to an unexistent device that was supposed to be there.
Such timeouts due to this would explain slow times.

If there's a config option in the games for sound?
I would make double sure only USBAUDIO is selected and that the other sound card is actually disabled either in CMOS or in Devmgr.

If you game, paranoia is in order. USB is probably slower than PCIe. So, as was mentioned, all the major components, connected my "a series of tubes" indeed have to wait for the USB part to do its' job. After that there's the hub, the controller, the IO subsystems, IO schedulers - and who knows - possible points of a bottleneck.

Maybe the USBAUDIO controller has a bitrate mismatch with what your games work with. Using them would probably cause a stall because the USB DAC has to transcode on the fly.

So, to wrap up, I'd exchange SATA and USB cables, disable USB3 for the time being, check for walls of errors under Linux.

Also, if you still have Resource Monitor in Win10, you could have it running in the background and plotting various parameters during the abnormal happenings. May help narrow it down.
 
Not so sure about the USB 3 thing, they said they tested on non USB 3 and USB 3 machines, they both had the slow game loading on Windows 10.
 
The guys at JDS Labs tested a bunch of UAC1 DACs with Windows 10 and game loading times and confirmed the bug is present on all of them under Win 10.

Can anyone here on [H]ard with Windows 10 and a UAC1 DAC test some games and see if the bug occurs for them as well?
 
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