[TEC] PCI Latency CTD fix

[Stormfly]

Hi,

just another possible CTD fix for ppl who have some problems:

Problem:

SH5 crashes to desktop or system hangs in combination with anoying sounds playing after some minutes of gameplay, especially in high system load situations like stormy weather, near a big convoy or just beeing in a combat situation etc...

I figured that this is only happening to me using my old sound rig SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS, in combination with medium or high hardware accelration enabled. If i use the lower quality on board sound hw or simply set hardware accelration to minimum (dxdiag.exe, you will loose 3D sound then) the problem go away.

I could`nt live with low quality on board sound or hear the sound`s 2D only, so i hunted this problem further. A very old rule says keep your drivers up to date (this is not true for some other sims and and the video driver regarding anti aliasing) but i forgot about the bios. My EVGA main board bios (nForce 680I SLI) was out of date and used no PCI Latency for older PCI cards at all, it was simply "not set". I found that using the PCI Latency Tool hosted by guru3d (http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951).
After updating the BIOS iam able to play SH5 together with a higher quality sound in 3D without CTD in hw stress situations, the new BIOS automaticaly use a PCI latency of 32ms for all SB Audigy devices.

If you have this problem, try updating your BIOS, if you still have problems, try setting all your PCI devicecs which are related to your sound card to a latency of 32ms using the PCI Latency Tool.